How about the "Lazy Gertrude"?

Names (we were talking about them yesterday) can be so cruel. For instance, there are thousands of men born long before 1987 who now walk around with the name "Bart Simpson."  Their parents had no way of knowing!

People named "John" are not too fond of others saying they have to go to the, uhhh...John.

But how about poor Susan? A lot of people named Susan must be spinning around because of that ubiquitous kitchen appliance, the Lazy Susan.

It's a tray that rotates.  We have salt, pepper, napkins, and spices on ours.  You see the big ones in Chinese restaurants so that everyone can pass around the sliced duck in garlic sauce, the crispy seaweed with chopped scallops, the pork dumplings, the won ton soup, and the dim sum.

"Dim sum" is a name given to me by a Cantonese algebra teacher to describe how dismal I was at adding numbers.

The Chinese are kinder about it than we are! They don't call them Lazy Susans at all; they say 餐桌转盘 (p cānzhuō zhuànpán), which means "dinner-table turntables."  Of course, Susan is not a real Chinese name, any more than Chop Susie.

The term "Lazy Susan" is intermingled with the term "dumbwaiter."  Today, a dumbwaiter is a counterbalanced small elevator that is commonly used to send meals or supplies from one floor of a building to another. It's not for people to ride in, no matter what that wiseguy in the kitchen told you.

But in the 19th Century, apparently, we were obsessed with having meals without putting up with loquacious waiters who yakked and yammered all through dinner, preventing diners from talking about the horseless carriage and the newfangled typewriter and telephone. So people wanted a way to have food sent up from the kitchen without a lot of yakety yak, and invented a hoist to bring up the venison and wild okra.

If you think about it, we are a demanding lot, Americans. We want food without any social interaction and we want to send the egg rolls around to Aunt Fritzi without actually having to reach up and pass them to her.