My husband, AKA the-rockingest-husband-who-spends-part-of-his-labor-day-shopping-for-school-supplies-for-me-while-I-work-on-the-schoolwork-over-which-I-predictably-procrastinated-all-weekend-long, is a lover of pumpernickel. The last two days, we’ve visited Noah’s Bagels in the mornings to acquire said pumpernickel taste, toasted, so that he may delight in its odd flavor. (We tried Saturday, also, but they were out of pumpernickel. Out of pumpernickel??! OutRAGEous!) Steve is proud to be a lifetime lover of pumpernickel, a fact I find strange, since the only way an adult would ever have convinced me as a child to partake of a non-white-bread item like pumpernickel would have been to lie and say it was chocolate. A gagging, spitting-out-of-non-chocolate-betrayal would have followed.

Today, Steve looked up “pumpernickel” on Wikipedia. The best part of the entry is this, the word history:

The word “pumpernickel” derives from the Old High German words “pumpern”, to fart, and “Nickel”, a demon or goblin. The bread got this name for its supposed indigestible quality, although modern pumpernickel breads seem to lack this feature. There is an alternate popular etymology that Napoleon said that pumpernickel bread was only fit to be fed to his horse, Nicole — that it was “pain pour Nicole”. However, dictionaries do not support this etymology.

Pumpernickel: My new favorite word.

After debating the rights and wrongs of a pumpernickel-free childhood (Steve finds it abusive to deny a child the finer grains, while I just don’t see a problem with livin’ in your white-bread world as long as anyone with hot blood can) (that was a Billy Joel reference, by the way), we somehow segued into another debate we often have: The laxative nature of fruit. While I’ve tried to spread the word about fruit’s evil intentions in the partaker’s digestive system by educating friends and strangers alike, Steve continues to deny that each piece of fruit packs the equivalent of ten entire packs of Ex-Lax. Trust me, readers, be wary of this fiendish food group. If someone tries to convince you otherwise, tell them to shut their pumpernickel.