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It's a lyric before it's anything else. "Our house is a very, very, very fine house" opens the second verse of "Our House," the 1970 song Graham Nash wrote for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young after moving in with Joni Mitchell. Thi sis too cute to believe, but he wrote it the same afternoon he bought her two cats!
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In 2021 I got an email from a guy named Vikram. He lived in the UK, and he wanted a doormat that said welcome in Kannada. Not English. Not a language I'd ever made a mat in before. Kannada, specifically, because that's the language his family spoke and the mat at his front door in England was the one part of his day that got to be from home.
That's the whole origin story. One customer, one request, one language I had to go look up how to render correctly. Vikram's the reason this mat…
Amscray is pig Latin for scram.
Pig Latin works by taking the first consonant sound off a word, moving it to the end, and tacking on "ay." Scram loses its "scr," which goes to the back, and picks up "ay": scram becomes amscray. Same trick as ixnay for nix or amscray's cousin, ammerbay, for beat it. It's schoolyard code, older than most of the internet, and it still works exactly the way it did when you first heard it.
The word carries more attitude than "…
I have been putting swear words on Christmas decorations since 2009 and I still get the same question every December, usually from someone's sister.
Isn't that a bit much for Christmas?
No. And I can tell you precisely why, because I've spent seventeen years finding the edge of this by walking off it a few times.
Half of Tolkien's best moments happen at a door. The Doors of Durin. Bag End's round green door. The whole point of a doormat is the threshold, and no fandom on earth has spent more time on thresholds than Middle-earth. Honestly, the doormat was basically invented for this.
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There are two Thanksgivings and every year I sell mats to both.
One of them is the good one. People you chose, food you like, somebody's dog under the table, a walk afterward. The other one is an obligation with gravy on it, and you are counting the hours from the moment you park.
I'm not going to pretend the second one doesn't exist, because half my customers are living it.
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