MAGGA: I Guess The Obvious Eludes Them

I need to point out something here.

The title says "MAGGA" not "MAGA"; that was on purpose.

I Arabic there is a wonderful little thing called a, I think I remember correctly, a "shadda".

There is a linguistic name for that kind of symbol, but I can't remember it.

Doesn't matter.

What the symbol does is it puts emphasis on the character that it resides on top of.

And it makes that character be emphasized vocally.

And that emphasis changes the meaning of the character and the word that it inhabits.

Nouri al-Khaldy, my Arabic teacher, and fast friend, still across the ages, told us this story.

"Shadda puts emphasis on a character and on its associated word.

"And that changes, usually, the meaning of that word.

"For example, 'quada' means 'to get'.

"Put a shadda over the 'd' and you have a word that means, literally, 'really, or, emphatically, get'.

"That is not its Arabic meaning.

"Its Arabic meaning is "pimp".

The second G in MAGGA is my best attempt at putting a shadda over the G in MAGA.

The word ends up "really great"; what it means - remember "pimp", is "BULLSHIT"

But on to the real point of this little story.

Back in the pandemic I was sitting in front of The Skagit Bird Seed Store waiting for someone to bring a forty-pound sack of seed out to my car - pandemic protocol, remember? 

One of the owners appeared and was nearly in tears as she gave me the brief life story of her husband, "a retired navy seal, yata, yata, yata, yata".

As the author of Saigon 1967 I tuned out.

We all have our crosses to bear.

But then she bridged to her real point.

As she handed me back my Visa card she went into a tearful rendition of the "they are all out to get poor donnie" narrative.

I waited for her to stop and breathe and then said, "if there is some way to get rid of him, I vote for that".

I guess because I had a USAA credit card, she thought I didn't know shit from trump and didn't know that that I preferred shit.