Hut saray-al

Most people only know the broad strokes of Boston/New England accents -- dropping the r's, stuff like that. But there are other subtleties that only those who have lived there are usually familiar with. Like randomly changing o's into u's. So "hot popcorn" becomes "hut pupcorn." (Like I said, randomly -- note that the second "o" in "popcorn" remains intact.) There's an occasional tendency to drop the second "u" in museum, resulting in something like "muzeem." And I think this more of a northern New England thing, but some kids I knew growing up would say "saray-al" instead of "cereal."

And now I've explained the title of the post, so let's move on. I already discussed my dislike of overly grainy hot cereal. It just doesn't do it for me. Mushy hot cereal is the way to go. I discovered this particular kind of mushy hot cereal sort of by accident a few weeks ago, when I was in Whole Foods looking for other things. I went through a box of it in about 2 weeks, and after a week-long interlude of that crappy grainy stuff, have now started on my second box. Seriously, it's awesome. This morning I had a bowl with chopped walnuts and raspberries mixed in (plus a little sugar), and of course, 2 lightly toasted crumpets with butter. By the way, I think the trick to creating successful British euphemisms is to make sure they include "crumpets" and "if you know what I mean." For example: "Oh, they were married for a bit, but I hear he's buttering his own crumpets these days, if you know what I mean." Or, "That bloke's a few crumpets shy of afternoon tea, if you know what I mean." Yeah, you get the point.