I was looking for a polite way to insult someone

I was looking for a polite way to insult someone and have come to the conclusion that there is no way. My overactive guilt complex alerted me to the fact that it is offensive to insult anyone, even when they deserve it.

Darn, I was really looking forward to calling someone a “Ding-Dong,” until I looked up the origin of the phrase. Most of my writings are interrupted by some computer diversion (Some mornings, I have the attention span of a moth,) like looking up the definition of a word on three different websites, then reading the history of the word to determine if that is indeed the correct term that suits my usage.

This morning, I discovered through my five minute research binge that a “Ding Dong” is really a “Ring Ding” formerly known as a “Big Wheel” or a “King Don” currently still made in Canada. Hostess, who went out of business in 2012, began marketing the hockey puck shaped cake in 1967, which is why the term was a part of my soul. I am a product of tv marketing in the 1970’s and I probably have some residual jingles associated with the old Hostess Brand marketing stuck in my subconscious or unconscious mind.

(Yes, I just went on another little definition diversion and choose not to choose whether I prefer subconscious or unconscious this morning. Can I recall the jingle from memory or do I need psychotherapy to pull this from my subconscious mind? Irrelevant because I’m talking about chocolate cake.)

Now, this is not the chocolate cake of today, that I could bake in my own oven. This is the chocolate cake of memory, from my childhood. The manna from heaven that a child mentally envisions when you have some scrounged change burning a hole in your pocket because you are at a store and you want what you saw on tv every day of the week, because the mental drilling power of tv marketing was much stronger back then and there you were with your poor little impressionable mind screaming, I NEED TO BUY A DING DONG! I gasp for air and realize I don’t actually remember Ding Dongs other than the word and the giggle associated with it. My mom would never even let us buy that stuff. What I really used to like were Ho-Ho’s but saying that aloud could get you in trouble where I’m from. So, shhhh, mum’s the word.

Now, I know that I can insult someone, guilt free, by calling them King Don and they won’t even consider it to be a barb. Unless they live in Canada, read my blog and hate hockey puck shaped chocolate cake.

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