Daily Blague

Kathleen had fallen asleep, but I bent over to kiss her goodnight, and in her sleepiness she cried, "You smell so good. I think it's your beard!" "You don't think it's my cologne?" I asked. But she had fallen back to sleep by then.

I had actually said, "...it's my kalogney?" That's what clever kids do well into their fifties: they deliberately mispronounce foreign words. Or worse: I have a friend who used to be incapable of calling a car a Lincoln: it had to be a Lincogne. In Spanish: Lincoña. Don't ask me where this came from. I can sort of guess, though.

Walking from the bedside to the deskside, I thought: the humor of saying "kalogney" rests on everyone's knowing not only how the word is pronounced but also how it is spelled. And what could be a better test of this than Googling the non-word "calone"? That's how you'd spell it if you'd never read it, right? And what is the Blogosphere but a haven for writers who don't read? The following passages are first-page returns for "calone smell. " (You will want to use the Find on this Page feature in Edit.)

ll make you weak from just the smell of my calone. Your be following me home!

what is your favorite calone?

[What you currently smell like] calone...long night hehe

That's EXACTLY what I was thinking. The article promised--promised!--that we were nearing the end of the cycle of all-alike fresh-outdoorsy scents and moving into some warmer men's scents, and all I see and smell is calone everywhere. I'm so sick of it! I tried three new scents this evening--Instinct by David Beckham, Guess Man, and Nautica Blue--and they're ALL THE SAME.

Ewie.

First, I hate when people smell fake... I'm a hippy that way. :D Ok, if there's really bad BO, roll on the deoderant... but for just body smell, ick! I can see why some perfume might be attractive, it actually smells pretty, but I ALWAYS hate guy's calone. However, both are perfumes, calogne is called that to make the man feel "Manly" (he couldn't groom himself, no!) But I digress..

And I think that I could on and on go - but for the sweetness of the last entry's orthographic polymorphousness, so characteristic of Earlier English.

It's possible, however, that not one of the passages that I've held up for - well, certainly not ridicule contains a misspelling of the word "cologne." Consider:

ectocarpene, Calone 1951 ®, and a new experimental marine odorant

Perhaps everyone's been talking about the marine fragrance known as "Calone." It would be a good joke.

The awful truth is that people who wear cologne as a matter of course, or don't, also as a matter of course, say "scent."