The Haxtun-Fleming Herald - What can we reason but from what we know? -Alexander Pope

It has been said that after two people have been married a long time, they begin to look alike. I have seen examples of this a few times. I also will proclaim no amount of years will ever make my beautiful, five foot blonde wife look like me. Thank God for that. It is more common for two long time marrieds to begin thinking alike. I present my sister and brother-in-law as prime examples.

Brother-in-law Ken has been a long-time supply source of potential column ideas. Most, I don’t use. He has, however, presented a few that I just had to write, always credited as the source. “Why are they called a pair of pants?” is a classic as well as “Why AROUNDtoit? What about a SQUAREtoit?” A while back I received a phone call with another such weighty question, not from Ken but from sister Pam. “I’ve got a question for you,” she began, “when something catches fire, does it burn down or up?”

At first I was going to pop off that flames always go up. Before I could respond, she had added, “why does a house burn down, yet the contents are burnt up?” If her goal was to leave me speechless, which is no small task, it worked. The past weeks my mind has interrupted other thoughts with reminders of her question. Possible explanations are the house has to burn down before the contents can burn up. Nope. That doesn’t work out. Could it be related to the size of the object? Big things burn down. Little things burn up. Then I remember accounts of range fires where someone’s grass was burnt up and the barn was burned down. A personal experience of Sue and mine was a small house fire several years ago caused by my over-zealous application of Christmas lights and wholly inadequate wiring. Smoke and flames went up yet to this day we recount the night our house almost burned down.

Maybe it is the word itself that causes the confusion. As I wrote this I discovered my alternate use of “burned” and “burnt.” Turning to my antique version of spell check, aka, “The New World Dictionary” that lives on the shelf above my desk, I found burn is evidently a very confusing word. While most definitions require one half to a full inch to deal with it’s definition, the word burn used up nearly five inches of space. Clearly, this must be the answer. One problem. I looked up the word “clear.” Seven inches are devoted to what it means. I am confused. By the way, the definition of that word takes only three quarters of an inch.

Regarding my answer to sister Pam about the direction of a fire. She is clearly confused.