At lunch today, I sliced a tomato after removing a sticker reading “Home Grown.” To me, this means grown in someone’s garden, although I wouldn’t mind if it were grown in a farm with its own market. This tomato came from a commercial farm somewhere near here and had traveled through a distribution center before reaching the grocery store of a large retail chain where I purchased it. So much for homegrown.

The bakery within this supermarket has racks filled with “home baked” loaves of bread, cakes, pies, and cookies, none of which will have seen a home until I take it there. Why do we debase our language in this way?

Is it because we are “unique” or “exclusive,” two terms that are often misused. Being “unique” beats being “rather unique,” I suppose. WNEW Radio in New York used to advertise itself as being “unique in all the world,” by which I suppose it meant “totally unique” or even “uniquely unique.”

There’s so much of this, it makes me “nauseous.”  I have nothing “farther” to say on this, but I’m “definitely certain” you may. If so, “write me.”