A Hearty Snack

My study snack of choice for the past couple of weeks has been a small handful from the sack of Necco Sweethearts that I brought from home (along with a package of High School Musical Valentines that I distributed to friends yesterday).

They're perfect because you don't eat them very fast and you get sick of them after eating only a very few. But they can also be a little distracting, especially if you are a literary-minded person.

Also if you once took a class called "Topics in Linguistics", with a lot of emphasis on cognitive metaphors.

Once I glanced down at a sweetheart before popping it in my mouth and froze. It said, "Top Chef".

I've no idea how that's romantic. It seemed to be a nice, if slightly generic, compliment. They could just fill the hearts with other little two-word niceties like, "nice hair" and "good legs".

Then I picked another one that said "Stir My ♥". And later, still another, that said "Melt My ♥". Hmm. Maybe these are image schemas - I didn't do too well in that class. At any rate, Necco seems to like the cuisine-related suggestions they get from people. I also get distracted by all of the hearts that have to do with contact. From "Call Me" to "Fax Me" to "IM Me", there are a lot of these. Who even uses a fax machine anymore? Okay, some people do, but they seem to have been relegated to purely business-related contact. What are they trying to do, record the history of communication means in summary? A quick visit to the Necco website tells me that VP Walter Marshall introduced "Fax Me" in the '90s when he first decided to add and dismiss sayings each year. Therefore, "From old tech, 'Fax Me' to new tech, 'Email Me', Sweethearts keep the pulse on the heartbeat of the nation".

So it looks like perhaps they are logging an overview of the history of communications. They should introduce some more old-school sayings, like, say, "Write Me". I don't think they have that one.

Anyway, I sure wish I had thought of this as a topic for my final paper in linguistics last spring. It probably would have been, well, sweeter, than whatever it was I chose to write about - I've shut that assignment out of my memory.