Allow Me to Exaggerate!!!
A reader responding to my recent article My Wife Needs 42 Pieces of Luggage To Travel where I concluded with "Ah, women and travel," emailed me a complaint that not all women travel with excess luggage. Please, dear readers, when I make such references, allow me to use hyperbole.
If I write that my wife's handbag weighs a ton, I do not mean it actually, physically, in reality weighs 2,000 pounds. This applies as well when I write jokes about Arabs and goats - let me say here that not every male Arab has sex with goats, but many do because they are overly frustrated due to the restrictions of Islam regarding relations with the opposite sex.
That's how jokes work - they generalize. A joke would not be funny if it were devoid of hyperbole. For example, no one would find bartender jokes humorous if they started off this way to avoid generalities: a lawyer, not all lawyers but a particular lawyer; a Jew, but not all Jews just this particular Jew; and an Irishman, but not all Irishmen, just this particular Irishman walk into a bar, but not to say that only lawyers, Jews and Irishmen go into bars, and not to disparage all bars as indicative of what happens inside this one, so I am only referring to one particular bar ...
By now the audience should be dead asleep. So please dear readers, allow me to exaggerate.
Notwithstanding the above, in the interest of balance, here is a travel quote attributed to New York Times' Writer Susan Heller, to show that some women have good travel sense in regard to packing luggage, although I believe the advice was originally uttered by Alexander the Great before embarking on his travels: "When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money." -Susan Heller
