Military Moustache

Memorial Day, 2009. The unofficial start of summer.

My friend and list member Marsha S., also known as "Da Mouse," has been featuring in her own e-mail post (a lovely eclectic collection of jokes, photos, trivia, and recipes) a link to something called "Pizza for Patriots."

Your donations will help deliver a couple thousand pizzas from Chicago to our service people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Short and baby-faced, my buddy Wiggins had trouble being taken seriously in the Army, due to his youthful appearance. A moustache, he assumed, would fix that.

He was wrong.

"Wiggins!" bellowed our drill sergeant, after spotting the growth during inspection one day. "What's so special about your nose that it's got to be underlined??!"

[with thanks to Reader's Digest Online]

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WORD for YOUR WEEK: In Latin, "quadrum" meant a square, four-sided thing. The Italians soon modified it to "quadro" which was used to describe a framework. The French took the word and turned it into "cadre," which they used to describe a picture frame. Sir Walter Scott used the word in his 1830 "Lay of the Last Minstrel" and shortly thereafter the word "cadre" began to be used to describe a group of people who worked within a specific frame of reference, or specific organization. That definition has since been enhanced to add layers of meaning so that "cadre" now describes not only a group of people working in a specific field, but a highly-trained and close-knit group, as well.

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