“Take my first job in Boston,

the outgoing typist said, ‘You’ve got

to know the foms, we use so many foms.’

And I said O why farms?

I thought law firms had torts.

A tort, I thought, was like vous avez tort.

But I was wrong about the farms,

and after the Cardinal’s Vietnam speech

one of the girls said, ‘Think you’re smat with that accent?’’’

— From Anne Winter’s “Day and Night in Virginia and Boston