Butterbeanisms shed some light on life

A few years back, publishing books or articles on the various forms and usages of the English language was a definite trend. People gathered and disseminated collections of malapropisms, oxymorons, sniglets, typos, and palindromes, to name a few. All of them were up for grabs, and if you could collect enough of them for a book or an article, you were on your way. You could get rich just by fiddling around with English.

I also remember publications about various laws and axioms such as Murphy’s and Duffy’s, Some of them were hilarious.

As you can guess, Bertha has collected a few "isms" of her own. Well, barely enough for a column. A good share of them relate to children who never follow the rules and make up their own rules as they go along anyway. Here is the original unabridged assortment of Butterbeanisms:

• Little kids put their shoes on the wrong feet one hundred percent of the time. Forget The Law of Probabilities.
• Mine is always the car that is out of gas.
• If you can retain possession of both the right and left of a pair of socks for a month, you will have to keep them for the rest of your life.
• Kids always get sick on the doctor’s day off.
• If there are five things to do in one week, they will all need to be done in one day.
The probability of a kid losing his coat is directly proportional to the value of the coat. (They never lose hand-me-downs.)
• Picking up a flyswatter renders flying insects invisible.
• At any given time and in any one place, one or all of the following is missing: the scissors, the cellophane tape, the remote.
• Fruitcake happens. (Maybe this a just another way of stating Murphy’s Law.)
• The main drawback of a day planner is that first you have to remember where you put it.
• Never take a kid to town to buy candy; he either wets his pants or gets lost.

And just so you know, the ten-second rule was not coined by us but has been thoroughly tested in the Butterbean household, and in the process we have proved the validity of the "bread, when dropped, will always come to rest butter side down" axiom.

My compendium of wisdom is sure to push a little on the frontiers of human reason and scientific knowledge. Might even budge them a bit. What this planet needs is order and reason. I hope life makes a little more sense to you now.

By the way, feel free to throw the "if you saw it in print, it must be true" adage out the window if you haven’t already.