Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Demonstat* (for Demonstrate, Demonstration, etc.)

“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”  So went the old advertisement for Chiffon margarine.  When Mother Nature realized she had been fooled into thinking the partially hydrogenated substitute was her sweet, creamy butter, she demonstrated her displeasure with thunder and lightning.

One has to wonder if someone hasn’t seriously deceived Mother Nature to provoke the display of wrath we’ve seen in the last month or so: wildfires in Colorado, flooding and tornadoes from tropical storm Debby, and a derecho (land hurricane) that knocked out power from the Midwest to the East Coast.  Not to mention the record heat and drought in much of the country.  Sadly, there’s nothing silly about the destruction and death these events have caused.

But as for the more benign Mother Nature from the world of Chiffon, she was portrayed by actress Dena Dietrich, a Pittsburgh native born in 1928.  Her credits include roles on several soap operas, the sitcoms The Golden Girls and Murphy Brown, and various other films and television programs.

Demonstat* is another typo of high probability.  There are currently 43 English-language instances of it in the OhioLINK database.

(Mother Nature as portrayed by Dena Dietrich, from Wikiality)

Deb Kulczak

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