Distinctions

A Thousand Words for Poop

In the Bad Old Days

Every bar and restaurant featured a cigarette machine. Each machine offered rows and rows of glowing push-buttons, each button labeled with a brand. A book of matches was free. Imagine: Offering free matches so that people would buy cigarettes? That reminds me of tech companies that sell you the printer for cheap, but charge a fortune for the ink cartridges.

Back in the day, people split hairs over cigarette brands. Your brand was your identity: A statement jutting out from between your lips. My father smoked Winstons. My mother, Salems. If he ran out, he’d drive into town to buy his brand rather than bum a Salem from my mom. Salems were a “Women’s” cigarette. Funny that. Marlboros had been marketed toward women, but as they lost market share, the company rebranded with the Marlboro Man and sought a male market.

In her novel Heartburn, Nora Ephron’s narrator finds the butt of a Virginia Slim cigarette in an ashtray in her fiance’s apartment. She thinks, Who’s been eating my porridge? He tells her that he bummed the cigarette from a Copy Girl at the Washington Post. She tells him, “Even Copy Girls aren’t naive enough to smoke Virginia Slims.”

Truman Capote told friends that True cigarettes had been named for him. Newports, Kents, Pall Malls, Winstons, Capris, Merits, Parliments, Lucky Strikes, Kools, if you found the butt of a cigarette — as a kid — you could play detective and profile the likely smoker.

Cigarette brands were as divisive as theology. Family gatherings were rent by arguments of one over another. When something is important, we study it in finer and finer detail and identify distinctions. In my household, it’s dog poop. The poop declares the hourly well being of the dog. Was the last poop solid? Soft-serve? Squirts? Pick-Up-Able? A two-bagger? Bloody? Semi-soft? We’ve got a dozen or more distinctions, and each hints at future vet bills and changes in the dog’s diet. Much of our lives hinges on how the next poop shows up.

The way Eskimos supposedly are about snow (having countless words for each distinction of snow), that’s how my parents were about cigarette brands, and that’s how my household is about the dog’s twice-daily bowel movement.

That Said

As you’re creating a character, consider what’s important to that character. What will that character have a dozen ways of distinguishing and grading?

In your favorite fiction, what are the myriad distinctions that characters have for seemingly ordinary things? Think of This Scene — at 1:00 “It’s a tough call. They’re so different” — the stylists recognize fine distinctions to which the newbie is blind.

Among drug users I’d bet the distinctions splinter into infinity. What’s so important to your character that he/she will grade and judge it by even the slightest variations?

Still monitoring the Bios, we’ll return to those soon. For now tweak yours as you choose.