PICK IT UP!
I was enjoying my lunch with my fellow third-graders in the lunch area in elementary school, and we were laughing and sharing peanut butter sandwiches and so on, when I accidentally reached over and spilled the milk carton I’d spent my lunch money on. The milk had dribbled out of the little wax carton, and puddled all over the sweltering blacktop under the lunchtable.
“Oh shoot!” I thought, as I looked around to see Mr. Duke heading toward us, with a mean look on his face.
A particularly insensitive man, he was assigned the duty of patrolling the lunch area, and he did NOT like what he was seeing!
“You’ve spilled your milk! PICK it up!”, he demanded.
I looked quizzically at him, knowing that since milk is a liquid, the proper term for it would be to WIPE it up, not PICK it up. My mind raced through the possibilities of complying to his demand, but it could not grasp the physical requirements for PICKing up a liquid. I envisioned placing my thumb and forefinger over the spill, bringing them together at its edge, and being able to lift the spill up and nestle it neatly back into the carton. But this was a physical impossibility, I knew that. One cannot PICK up a spill. One could WIPE up a spill, perhaps with an absorbent towel or napkin, but one could certainly never in this physical universe, PICK up a spill.
“PICK it up!”, he repeated. And my quizzical looks had not registered with him. The semantics of the situation caused me great consternation. He couldn’t see that I had trouble deciphering his instruction. He seemed to be perfectly content with his choice of words.
I couldn’t help myself; I began to cry. I cried because he stubbornly stuck with the single, incorrect instruction.
Again, he screamed at me: “PICK it up!”
I cried even louder, whereupon he muttered “for crying out loud”, and then once again:
“PICK UP THE MILK!”
My incessant wailing got everybody’s attention. I wondered if anybody else was having this same semantic crisis. Eventually some lunch aides came to my rescue, and I saw them WIPING up the milk with absorbent towels of some sort. Sure, they can WIPE the milk up off the blacktop. But in Mr. Duke’s mind, they were PICKing up the milk. He never once stopped to consider that he had chosen the incorrect term for the action. THAT’S why I was so upset. Not because the milk was spilled. I wasn’t crying over spilled milk. I was crying because the insensitive asshole never even KNEW that he was issuing an incorrect command. I’d have been totally cool with it if he had asked me nicely to go get a towel and WIPE up the milk.
But he didn’t. He was completely ignorant of the semantics of it.
And that’s why I am the way I am today. It’s all Mr. Duke’s fault!
