MY APOLOGY

I heard from a fellow who was quite upset about my use of the term "chemo-lawn" in my letter to the newspaper about the buffers on the Riddle farm (reproduced in the previous post "Naive No More"). Evidently he’s in the lawn business, and as best I could understand, he thought I implied that there was something wrong with chemo-lawns. He demanded a public apology. So here goes:

I apologize. I promise never to write chemo-lawn again. I will not write it in capitals, like this: CHEMO-LAWN, nor in italics: chemo-lawn, nor in bold: chemo-lawn. I will try to not even think chemo-lawn, and I’ll tell everyone I know to forget the term chemo-lawn. Y'all got that? Forget CHEMO-LAWN.

But there’s a problem. I was only using a quicky term instead of "lawns consisting exclusively of turf grasses that are nourished by chemical fertilizers and cleared of insects and other living things by means of herbicide/pesticide application." I don’t want to type that all the time, so what to do?

How about (blank)-lawn? I could say: "Only a (blank) would live in a house surrounded by a (blank)-lawn." Does this work? After all, (blank) can mean anything, right?

I think I’ll go with this. So to my pal in the lawn biz, let me say that continued exposure to your (blank)-lawns could turn you into a (blankety-blank) and may even make your (blank) shrivel up and drop off.