Margarine Fingers, etc.: How Mandating Appropriate Language Will Make Us All Healthier
The war on obesity isn’t working. The government has tried banning French fries, hamburgers, and anything else that tastes good from school lunches; as well as banning soda machines from campuses, and sending FDA agents into children’s homes to bust them for eating Hostess Cupcakes and Ho Hos, and to confiscate such items to prevent kids from being corrupted by their moist, cream-filled goodness. Once these things have their evil talons in the bulging, fatty flesh of our youth, they’re lost to us forever!
That’s why we have to do more than simply ban everything that tastes good! After all, if we get rid of the food but leave our language the same, they’ll still be tempted by fattening idioms that will get them craving sweets and fatty foods just as much as seeing or smelling them would do! Just think about it: the language we use has consequences! And we can’t simply trust people to say the right thing anymore: this is an epidemic!
Just think about some of our idiomatic expressions, like: “butter fingers”, for example. That is a very fattening way of saying that someone drops or loses things easily! Plus, it’s high in suggested cholesterol, so it’s theoretically bad for your heart as well! That’s a risk we simply can no longer take, especially with spiraling health-care costs! That’s why I propose we mandate the use of healthier idiomatic expressions to replace these evil and antiquated ones. So rather than saying: “butter fingers”, we should (be forced by new government regulations to) say: “margarine fingers”. See? That sounds much healthier already! And you could even make it yet healthier still by saying: “Omega-3-fortified, low-saturated-fat margarine fingers”.
Then we’ll have to change other dangerous and insidiously pernicious expressions like: “sweet tooth” to something much healthier sounding, like: “tofu tooth”; and the naughtily luring: “eye candy” to something more acceptable, like: “eye vegetables”. Oh, and the criminally misleading term: "sweeten the deal" will have to be altered to: "get more fiber in the deal". Plus, the overly fattening expression: “the cream of the crop” must be changed to the beneficial regularity of: “the bran of the bunch”.
Also, saying something like: “everything’s sunshine and lollipops” should be modified to: “everything’s SPF-30 and 100% natural juice pops”. And, of course, the substantive expression: “where’s the beef?” will have to be replaced with the more politically correct: “where are the tomatoes?”, while the qualitative expression: “the cream rises to the top” will have to be updated with the snappy: “the skim proves to be healthier”. And the expression: "sweet", meaning "good", is to be banned completely: that might give people the idea that sweet-tasting stuff is good! (But the term: "salad days" can stay as it is; that's got the right idea already!)
And I hate to be the one to say it, but some texts will have to be altered as well, just to keep everything speaking with one voice. So the corruption of something even as innocuous-seeming as Shakespeare will have to be corrected. So, for example, it will be mandatory for the government to edit the bad example from Romeo and Juliet of: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” to the much more agreeable and healthy-sounding: “A rose by any other name would still smell the same”. See how much better of an example that is for our children? (I'm on to that Shakespeare guy! He's always trying to make people crave candy with his purple prose! He probably owned stock in Herhsey's and Godiva!)
This is just a brief and partial list. But the sooner we implement this new law, the healthier all of our children will be. And since the health (and so the very lives) of our children, and hence the future of our nation, is at stake here, I suggest that once the new list of terms is drawn up, we should make the punishment for using an unhealthy-sounding term rather than its new replacement be as severe as possible: death by chocolate.
