Dear Me Letter: Humor as Humus

Dear Me,

I get a kick out of earthy people with earthy ways and have known some of my ways to have earth. And like a lot of folks, if I don’t like the way I’ve planted them, I’ll plow them up and re-seed for a better crop. And if the crop harvests out to something I can live with, I’ll hang onto them. But sometimes it seems a crop itself could have a name that doesn’t fit it.

When you get right down to it, a crop of cotton that’s taken on so many boll weevils that you’re hard put to find any cotton left at all, it seems to me the cold hard fact is that it’s become a crop of boll weevils. And that’s the sort of way i feel about humor as I sometimes wear it. If my humor could be seen to be earthy, then I don’t think humor’s the word that says it. I think humus is the word when you get down to the nitty-gritty of it.

The dictionary says humus is the black or brown substance of the soil, formed by the decay of animal or vegetable matter and provides nutrition for plant life. It comes from a Latin word that means “ground.” If you want to twist your wit, it could fit. I take black words that are printed in the dictionary (words being a decayed kind of communication if you figure telepathy is a better way to communicate) and provide a sort of dry nutrient of amusement to some folks whose silliness has dried up for the most part like an old tree that’s lost its sap. But sometimes a person can sop up that sap of silliness again if he’s reminded. I guess that’s some of what I want to do with some of my wit: spark the sappy silly back from wherever it went (becaue I know if it was once there, it’s still there but maybe has blinders on it and has to somehow be dug up.)

Anyway, the root of the word humor, according to the dictionary, is “to be moist,” which does not fit my kind of wit and which I find is mostly dry when I hoe it up to be there at all. Sometimes i find I have to hang my humor on the line to dry.

 However, you can stretch humus two more ways from Sunday - whatever that means: has more flexibility. It can be moist or dry. Besides, instead of saying “Her work is humorous” one can say “Her work is humus,” which not only brings it down to earth where it belongs and can now be put in a compost heap, but is less work for you by taking the “oro” out of the word “humorous.” And as a bonus you can put an “e” in front of the last “o” of “oro” and have a cookie: oreo. Now doesn’t this fit what they call logic? It does if you have a mind to think that you can create logic that makes its own sense, even if it does turn out to be silly nonsense.