Well summer's almost over and soon it will be time for all of us to put away our...summer footwear.
You've done it, haven't you? If you're like me, you've called your sandals thongs.
The other day I was having a conversation with a friend when suddenly my 16-year-old daughter looked at me aghast and shrieked, "MOM!"
"What?!" I answered, alarmed.
She had a shocked and overly embarrassed look on her face.
"They're FLIP-FLOPS!" she crooned.
I stared at her blankly, clearly not understanding.
"You said THONG!" She was incredulous.
I did? Oh, that's right, I'm not supposed to call sandals thongs anymore; they're flip-flops. Never mind that I've called sandals thongs my entire life!
The other day my daughter and her grandmother were shopping together. Her grandmother approached the sales clerk.
"I'm looking for a nice comfortable pair of thongs ..."
The youthful salesclerk held back a smirk as her eyes darted around the room sheepishly to see who might have been listening.
"Grandma!" yelled my daughter, wearing the identical horrified look on her face that she wore during the previous word crime. "They're FLIP-FLOPS!"
Without missing a beat she responded, "Honey, before thongs were underwear they were worn on your feet. I'm too old to start calling them something different now."
"Don't ever wear those, sweetie," whispered a white-haired woman in the store to my daughter, "They're just not hygienic."
My daughter disappeared behind a partition, quickly.
I noticed one afternoon during school recess last year, a group of kids throwing their flip-flops onto the rooftop. A teacher emerged from and building (I'll mention here that he was of another generation) and yelled, "STOP THROWING YOUR THONGS ON THE ROOF!" Silence fell upon the playground. The expressions were priceless.
Interestingly, when I looked up the word sandal in my thesaurus, it listed flip-flop and thong. When I looked up thong, it did not list underwear. When did all this change and why did someone take a word we already know as a shoe and call it underwear?
Much of this could have been avoided if there had just been a new name for this new type of underwear. Is anyone with me here?
Well, fortunately I am getting better at auto-correcting myself. Sometimes there are awkward pauses as I strain to remember the difference, but I think I've finally got it straight.
As I finished up the laundry the other day, I folded the clothes fresh out of the dryer and tossed my daughter's underwear on the bed.
"Here's your flip-flop."
Karen Howell can be reached at khowell@mfire.com.
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