Question of the day is: What’s orange and sounds like a parrot?

Answer: A parrot.

I mean, really, what else?

OK, maybe you didn’t find that interesting. But what is interesting is that Carrot is a four-way homonym. At least I think it’s interesting, which is because I think a lot about insignificant things. But I do it for a good reason: It keeps me from thinking about SIGNIFICANT things.

That may sound bass-ackwards to most people, but hear me out.

The powers-that-be, the head honchos, the Big Kahunas, are in charge of all the significant aspects of our society, right? Right. And yet almost everything they touch, even briefly, they screw up.

Beyond that, the only times they laugh are either forced and phony, or at some poor slob’s misfortune. All in all they’re as joyless as they are incompetent. So why would anyone, either in or out of their right mind, waste any time letting those gonifs take up any space in their heads?

The answer — unlike the parrot/carrot conundrum — is obvious.

That said, let’s talk about the homonyms I mentioned.

What’s up, Doc(ument)?

I said there are four. Three, you already know. The vegetable is obvious. There’s a spelling confusion with two of the others, espesh since they both involve jewelry. Karat measures the purity of gold; Carat measures the weight of diamonds.

So what’s the fourth?

It’s Caret.

Caret is a punctuation mark — a V, either upside-down, or in repose, which to the less poetic means on its side. As in ^ or >.

It comes from the Latin word “Caret,” which means “it is lacking.” In editing, it’s inserted to show something’s missing in that sentence. It’s also used in math to mean either more or less than, depending which way it points. At least I THINK it does. My current recollections of my algebra class of 1961 are now as deficient as my algebra skills were then.

If you never knew what a Caret is or does, don’t feel bad. For all my decades in both the teaching and writing biz, I never did either. In fact, I first found out last week…and in a way I wish I hadn’t.

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Shiftless in Saranac Lake

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Last Thursday morn, I was home, sitting at my computer, starting up my column’s final draft, with about two hours ’till deadline. Two hours is long enough for me to hammer out and proofread the column, download it on my thumb drive and drive to the Enterprise for the handoff to Torrinda, so she can work her magic, putting in the paper.

At least, it’s plenty of time … if nothing goes wrong. If not, not. And last Thursday was a “not” day when it came to the column.

It didn’t start that way. Matter of fact, for the first half of the column, I was cookin’ with gas, as the old guys of my youth used to say. I was tap-tappin’ away, fingers flying over QWERTY et. al., when, without warning, the caret popped up on my monitor — the cyber equivalent of a roll of concertina wire.

I’d finished a sentence, hit the period key and — lo and behold! — there was no period. Instead, a sideways caret was in its place.

Odd, I thought, as I erased the caret, hit the period key and put in another caret. I must’ve done it another 10 times, and each time there was another caret. Or maybe more exactly, each time there was the same damned caret. Such distinctions aside, the fact was something was very wrong — and not with my right ring finger.

Keep in mind, I’m a compleat computer yutz. To me, a computer is just a super-efficient typewriter, and I use it only to type my column. Beyond that, I’m lost. As far as I know, inside the computer (in what I think what is called the hard drive) is a metropolis of microscopic beings who, when a key is pushed or a mouse is clicked, scurry to and fro carrying out their assigned tasks. And believe me, the last thing I need is to have some do-gooder geek try to explain to me how they work. I’m utterly ignorant of such things, and I’m much happier for it.

But back to me and my final draft, now taken over by the Caret Cartel: What to do?

First, I did what computer freaks always advise: I shut it off and waited a bit. Then I turned it on, typed in a bunch of periods, and watched a bunch of carets dance across the monitor.

“Bloody hell!” I shouted so loudly, Kitzel the cat almost woke up.

But I’m a Dope of action — I knew my outburst accomplished nothing, except maybe spiking my blood pressure and taking a valuable minute or two off my life. Instead, I had to DO something. And what I did was turn to the Savior of Humanity.

I’m not talking the conventional savior of mankind, but the savior of the computer-illiterate. In other words, Google.

When my computer does something bizarre (and because I got it second-hand about 15 years ago, it does bizarre things a lot of the time), I immediately type the prob in Google. Then, by the G and J, in a flash the AI genie appears with the solution, or a bunch of them. He always comes through … and he did this time too.

“Why, when I hit the period key, does this weird sideways V appear?” I asked.

Several answers popped up, but the first one was the right one: One of my shift keys was stuck in the down position. Something I never noticed (and maybe nobody does till their shift key goes south) is that the other punctuation mark on the period key is — Ta DA! — a caret.

All I had to do was free the shift key, right?

Wrong!

The shift key was so far gone, it couldn’t be freed, or even given a smoke break. Uh-uh, it was Farmisht. Farblonjet. Farpotshket. Farkakte. Forget the king’s horses and men: When it came to repairing my keyboard, all His Higness’ computer experts couldn’t have done doodle-poop either.

So there I was, my column half done, my computer keyboard-up and my deadline breathing down my neck.

As I said, I’m a Dope of action, and I sprang into it. First, I downloaded what I had into my thumb drive. Second, I grabbed the thumb drive and stashed it in my pocket. And third, after I bid adieu to my menagerie, I hied down to the Enterprise and used one of their computers to do the deed.

So that took care of that column, but what about the next ones?

Good question, and I have the perfect answer to it.

I’m a man of great faith. Oh, not in the conventional sense, perhaps, but when it comes to My Home Town, I’m a Believer. For as sure as God makes honey crisp apples (I mean, who cares about the little green ones anyway?), I know one of my readers — maybe a bunch of ’em — is gonna let me know they have a keyboard gathering dust in their attic and they’ll gladly make it mine.

And from what I know of the folks who are computer-savvy, they have so many keyboards, monitors, cables, even computers, in their Cyber Graveyard, they’ll be so delighted to finally unload one, they’ll deliver it to my door.