Flat Iron

I suppose everyone carries around misconceptions that go uncorrected for years. Ray, my roommate on Mission Hill, pronounced the French poet’s name as “Rim-bod”, probably thinking that those who pronounced it correctly were confusing him with the Sylvester Stallone character. Ned Stone, for another instance, persists—to this day, I saw him only last month—in pronouncing the word heinous as “heenous”. I myself was 30 or so when I finally learned the word that everyone pronounced “egree-juss” and the one I thought was pronounced e-greg-ious, the second syllable with two hard g’s, like the man’s name Greg, were in fact one and the same, meaning outrageous or flagrant.

Well it was only when I saw a little clip on Entertainment Tonight on how to achieve the look of stars at the Emmys—in this case, Halle Berry’s look—that I realized that a flat iron, used to straighten women’s hair, is an implement somewhat like a waffle iron or, more to the point, a curling iron. I had always thought that when women would iron their hair, they would lay their heads down on an ironing board and iron it straight. It’s a crazy image but that’s how I thought women straightened their hair. Silly moron.