The gift of bad wordplay.

You'll have noticed over the years that the Pattersons have the unlovely habit of using forced wordplay as a sort of round-about means of expressing themselves. We're coming up to a prime example of that in the early future when John tells Mike and Lizzie that yes, they gotta wait for the olds to stumble out of bed in the morning before they can attack their stuff. Instead of doing being one kind of idiot and browbeating them about the need to include Jim and Marian in the magic, John says something stupid about "age before booty" to sort of jolly them into accepting the inevitable.

That sort of irritating groaner would have been bad enough were it not for the fact that John continued to make stupid comments that revealed a rather cynical outlook about the holiday season. I mean, sure, he's the poor bastard who's gotta worry about paying for all of the holiday goodies but there are better ways of expressing one's frustration than being a wise-ass.

No El, No El, that nickname doesn't make sense.....

Of course, treating children like movie monsters is a rather obvious source of annoyance that we can see miles away and deal with. The problem is that there are insistent minor irritants that sting like gnats and are as hard to deal with. One of the ones that seems to gall people the most is the habit people have of calling Elly by the pet name of El. As my parents might have said, she sure doesn't look or act like an El. She looks and acts like someone who'd look at the person calling her that like he's scum and snippily insist on her real name.

Why is it thus that Lynn tries to make her into a woman we know she is not? Is she trying to further the myth that we don't see all of their lives so can only judge them by what they share? If so, she tends to lose sight of the fact that that choice is somewhat telling. As I said back during the Settlepocalypse, her need to avoid 'disturbing' people by showing Anthony and Liz behaving like human beings in love told us a lot about them and her. So it is with the fact that the only time we see Elly is when she's angry, smiling in vindictive glee or having her feelings hurt. The fact that Lynn calls a happy Elly who gets along with people a boring Elly tells us a lot about Lynn. It tells us that she has a low tolerance for boredom and a love of cheap theatrics.