This little gem of a video, courtesy of Buzzfeed, is a couple of days old already, but I don’t think it has gotten anywhere near the airplay it deserves, so I’m serving it up again tonight.
Donuts: They’re as American as Apple Pie
In it, you see Willard “Mitt” Romney trying and failing to remember the word “doughnut.”
(I am, myself, torn on the spelling of this word. On the one hand, doughnut is the original, correct spelling which preserves the original sense of the word: dough nut, a thing that looks like a nut but is made out of dough, but then you’ve got the hole in the middle which means it doesn’t actually resemble a nut at all. Donut is more streamlined and modern, like writing lite for light or thru for through. These are affectations I do not care for, although Noah Webster actually called for them over a century before they became common. The deciding factor for me, in this case, is that “donut” has become so common that, whatever I might think, the fight is over and “donut” has won. I’m also quite certain that the world’s most famous consumer of donuts, Homer Simpson, would spell it donut. So, from this point forward, that’s the spelling I’ll use.)
There are a couple of reasons why he may not have been able to think of the word. Possibly it was just a mental lapse, a brain fart, what they call in Czech a “window” although for the life of me I can’t understand why. It doesn’t necessarily mean that Willard is in the early stages of senile dementia like Reagan or McCain.
Possibly he has just been so focused on job creation lately that the word for such a humble little delicacy just plum slipped out of the rotation.
Maybe he is still feeling so burned from the “These aren’t home made cookies. These must be 7/11 cookies” gaffe of a couple of months ago that he was overthinking the whole thing. “I know these are called donuts, but what if they call them something else in this damned backwater hellhole of a state – where the hell am I anyway? – I’d better play it safe and say ‘chocolate goody,’ that can’t possibly offend anybody.”
Actually, that’s what I think happened.
Or, maybe, he actually didn’t know what they were called. I don’t know if Mormons are allowed to eat chocolate, but they don’t drink coffee and what, I ask you, is a donut without coffee? It’s like strawberries without the champagne, that’s what it’s like.
So, I wouldn’t be too down on poor old Willard just because he didn’t know what a donut is. One other thing I noticed in the video, though, is he didn’t actually eat the donut. He felt that merely pointing at it and saying “mmmm mmmmm, that looks good” was enough to make him seem like a regular guy, which it does not.
Eat or don’t eat, Willard. There is no in between.
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