By Jack Edwards

There is a popular book titled, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. That’s my policy too. I don’t let petty annoyances bother me which might irritate a less erudite man. (As you may recall from Sunday school, the Erudites were a tribe of short, barrel-chested people who were famous for their calm demeanor. For example, they rarely smote anyone with the jawbone of an ass. In fact, they rarely did any smoting at all, even with other donkey appendages.) This is also my mantra. It’s a rule I never violate. Except for today. Today, I am irritated. If, for example, I went to a donkey byproducts shop and tried to buy a jawbone, a responsible proprietor should delay the sale for a three-day cooling off period. Let me explain.

Our society likes to take a word, an otherwise perfectly good word that’s just standing around the dictionary minding its own beeswax not bothering anybody, and then proceed to beat that word to within an inch of its life. It kicks that poor word in the ribs. It leaves that word squirming on the ground in a dark alley to die. This crime is often perpetrated for the most time-honored of reasons: Money.

The most recent unsuspecting victim of this phenomenon is the word “handcrafted.” You can’t turn on your television, drive down the street or walk down the aisle of your grocery store without repeatedly tripping over this abused adjective. Manufactures are now slapping the term “handcrafted” on common everyday products, and then jacking the price up fifty percent.

We now have “handcrafted”: pizza, beer, ice cream, cocktails.  We even have handcrafted soap.  But the one that has me tempted to reach for a jawbone is this: Handcrafted Sandwiches.

Can someone please show me a sandwich slapped together at any time in history, going all the way back to the day the Earl of Sandwich sliced a loaf of bread in half with his sword and then smothered it with a thick layer of Nutella, that wasn’t handcrafted? It’s a sandwich. It’s made by hand. Do you really want to eat a sandwich made by someone’s feet?

“Handcrafted” used to mean something. It denoted using a skill to create a product that could otherwise have been mass produced – think of ornate furniture or a piece of fine clothing.

Today, every guy hocking ice cream at a crowded tourist trap is serving “handcrafted ice cream.” Yeah, I know, ice cream and beer are mass produced – but get this – so is this “handcrafted ice cream.” He didn’t put on his apron and whip up a cone just for you. There’s a tub of it sitting somewhere. He mass produced it. Believe me, he would have mixed up a bigger batch if his meager equipment allowed it.

Well, one might say, “handcrafted” pizzas are uniquely made – one at a time. Really? Have you watched them slap one together? Here’s my rule: If you can “handcraft” anything in under 30 seconds, you don’t get to call it “handcrafted.” Hear that Mr. Bartender serving drinks at an overpriced bar and calling them “handcrafted?” This means you.
And the worst of it is people buying into this baloney. You can spot them the moment the word leaves their mouths. They say it like this: “Doesn’t a HAND (grinding the ‘nd’ and pausing before completing the word) –CRAFTED (rolling the last half of the word in their mouth) beer sound delicious? Uhhh… “No.”

But I’m fighting a losing war. I’m tilting my lance at a handcrafted windmill.

There’s only one thing for me to do. It will take humility. It will take courage. It will take adding 11 strokes to the keyboard each week from here out. I will now be publishing a handcrafted humor column each week on Jocularious.com.