OK. I’ll be admit it. Sometimes I say things just to get a reaction from people. I don’t mean to harm or offend, but sometimes I get bored and…well…you humans are just too much fun not to toy with.
Case in point: Merrin & I are in SuperTarget to pick up some nectar of the gods (Diet Vanilla Coke) and they don’t have any. It’s not that they’re out. The simple don’t stock it. They’ve got Coke, Diet Coke, Diet Coke with Lemon, Vanilla Coke, Cherry Coke, etc.
Well, in my family, “Coke” is any soft drink. Sort of a universal term to describe all carbonated colas. Judging from this report I blogged way back when, the same is true for most people in the South. Elsewhere, some of you say “Soda”, some say “Pop”. Whatever, you know what I mean.
So, I turn to my wife and say, “Nope. All they’ve got is catholic.” A couple of seconds later a lady says to my wife, “He’s got problems.”
First of all, yeah, lady, I got problems, but English isn’t one of ’em. (Grammar maybe, but English – I got that one down pat.) The word catholic is an adjective and it means universal or general. Now it also appears as a noun, but that’s capitalized and means a member of the Roman Catholic church. Clearly I did not intend to say that the only Coke sold at SuperTarget is intended for adherents of the Roman Catholic church! So now, thanks to that one snarky (and evidently under-educated) lady, my wife has applied the censor and I can no longer describe things as “catholic”. And, I’m guessing, that new rule will apply catholically.
OOPS! It just slipped out!
Long story short, they had Diet Vanilla Coke at Tom Thumb. Yeah!
I believe I made it perfectly clear that the vast majority of people will not have the grasp of the word “catholic” in your intended sense. I also simply stated that you may want to pay heed to those around you when you make statements which could be interpreted in a manner which differs from the one you intended. One more note: I know you, and with that knowledge comes the certainty that you did not, in fact, intend it to mean “universal”. Even I was offended, and that’s hard to do.