Sweet Tooth

Long ago, from an etymological resource I can no longer find, I learned that people who enjoyed sweets were thought to have an extra tooth, the sweet tooth. People with a sweet tooth love--or even crave--sugar, candy, cookies, pastries, desserts, ice cream.

Test: do you find yourself standing at the kitchen cupboard, spoon in hand, eating the lumps that have formed in the brown-sugar bag? Do you know that you can actually create these lumps by adding a few drops of water to the bag ahead of time? No? Ahem. (Reclaiming dignity.)

Anyway, I inherited this sweet tooth from my Danish grandfather, all five feet four inches of him. (As the elder daughter of an only child, I also inherited boxes-ful of family information, including his naval record, which gives his barely regulation height.)

Somewhere in there is a letter he wrote home during the Great War. He enlisted right after America joined the war, April 1917, and set sail for France as the bursar of a naval troop-transport ship. He writes that his favorite thing to do is go up on deck with a box of chocolates and eat them all up.

Meanwhile, as for the things that keep a word nerd up at night:

Elder because in comparisons of two, your only choices are younger or older, the comparative form; in comparisons of three or more, you have old, older, and oldest, the superlative form. So if I had two sisters instead of one, I would be the oldest. And, as my sister reminds me, I will always be older.

As for giving my grandfather's height, I had several choices:
     five feet four inches
     5ft 4in
     5' 4"
I chose the version I did because it fit with the easy-to-read vibe of an informal essay.