The Sauce Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken

You’re the top, you’re Mahatma Gandhi. You’re the top, you’re Napoleon Brandy. You’re the purple light of a summer night in Spain. You’re the National Gallery, you’re Garbo’s salary. You’re cellophane. 

Cole Porter’s famous lyric was surely written about the human race. Yeah, we’re the top! [cut to outdoor shot – two strangers on Coast Village Road ecstatically perform a leaping high-five in slow motion] 

But… let’s talk. I want to take this opportunity to broach a sensitive topic that binds us all, despite our having conquered all. Let’s publicly identify and confess it here. Yes. [deep breath] 

Sweet Onion Sauce? We shatter your manacles today! 

Humankind Has Made a Good Show of It

Yes, humankind has made a good show of it, and in short order. We began walking upright about seven million years ago, acquired our IQ-and-language-bequeathing thumb dexterity two million years ago, and began naming objects and swapping gossip about 175,000 years ago. Whew! What’s the hurry?

Shrimp have been on the planet for about 500 million years. By now they should be piloting vast interstellar space arks and traversing the fog-shrouded labyrinth of time itself. Instead, their greatest advance to date has been our rebranding them as Sea Monkeys^® and selling them from the back of a comic book. You’re welcome, shrimp. Try harder next eon.

If the movies are to be believed, the Middle Paleolithic featured grunting, crouched humans gesturing balletically at the night sky in heavy-browed wonder. Look how far we’ve come! Today we say “autoclave,” “imprimatur,” “synergy,” “ideate,” and a host of other gibberish-adjacent things our pets strain to comprehend. Unless you give your dachshund a strip of bacon every time you say “autoclave!” you’re likely to get zero canine reaction. Okay? We own autoclave, as we own this world! [awkward cut to the leaping slo-mo high-five again]. 

There is just one problem. You know darned well what it is. 

A Hideous Sibilance

In our magisterial rise to the top, humans have developed some 7,164 languages. This “Planet Blabbermouth” reputation is likely the reason we have not been visited by small-talk-averse extraterrestrials. A topic for a later essay, perhaps.

The real problem is that some of these highly evolved word combinations are so delicately articulated, so ghastly in their sibilance, they may as well be spoken by a giant crab, with its dozen moving mouth parts and clicking locution. Words like “sizzle” and “sassafras” drive us mad, don’t they? The tormenting “She sells seashells by the seashore” compels a lawn furniture-hurling mania, does it not? 

Of course the emperor of sibilant horror is the Subway^™ sandwich sauce “Sweet Onion.” At a given moment in my life I had to give up this utterly delicious sandwich sauce. Why? Because I couldn’t bring myself to say it aloud. My early, anguished attempts to silently mime “Sweet Onion” proved alarming to the young sandwich workers. I have tasted the bite of the Subway^® Taser.

Oh, lemme guess: I should see a therapist, right? Hawhaw! Why? So you can feel better about being able to say “Sweet Onion” in a public space? Excuse me, but who’s the loony tune in this picture? Hawhaw! 

The Guy in Front of Me

So the guy in front of me orders his footlong Italian sub and its accompanying sandwich sauce. It’s that sauce I absolutely love, but whose delightfully tangy flavor I have – as already laboriously explained – long since had to forgo. That damnable sauce and its phonetic suggestion of fussy, doomed humanity!

We didn’t claw all this way up from the trilobite just to stand in a little line and delicately ask that Sweet Onion dressing be applied with a squirt bottle to our Black Forest Ham sandwiches. DID WE? Who wants to be illuminated so strikingly on the Cosmic Mortality Radar? Like you, I order mayonnaise now. The word is comparatively robust. It can sound on repeat murmurings like the name of a charming little French village with a water pump in the town square. “Sweet Onion” by contrast is an incantation so alive with hissing sibilance and preening destruction it collapses the Moment. Buh Bye Sweet Onion!

“Sauce?”

“Mayo.”

But this guy in the line ahead of me – he orders my favorite sauce without stammering or blanching, simply because he wants it on his sandwich! As if that’s reason enough. Oh… look at his neatly trimmed beard! He just wants to taste the sauce on his sandwich, never mind that he has to pronounce the sauce’s name aloud to our common shame. He would rather have a great tasting sandwich than his pride. If only it were that simple.

For him – this knap-sacked specimen with his tidy beard and helpless staring inspection of chilled lunch meats through curved glass – it is that simple. And he is the worst of us. He has no inkling that saying “Sweet Onion” aloud brings to bear on the fragile human condition all the ruin this realm can offer! He doesn’t know what you and I know, reader! Neatly Trimmed Beard Guy is not subject to the overwhelming interiority that rises and rises and overruns its banks – a flood tide of extrinsic shame and self-abnegation. He enviably lacks the self-immolating subjectivity that hobbles you and I when we are ordering sauces or buying chewing gum or shirts; that autonoetic Self which stands separate and leers over our every sandwich order. 

What about the watchbands we lean over and choose with such deliberation? How about our carefully sat-through haircuts? At the end of that pitiable ceremony, the beautician holds a little mirror behind the head that we may be assured. Why the terrible little mirror?! What do the 95 moons of Jupiter care if the little haircut looks lousy from behind? Oh, okay. And I need a therapist? 

“Sauce?” asks the wall-eyed kid in his visor.

“I’m gonna do the Sweet Onion.”

YOU FOOL! YOU FOOL! YOU RECKLESS FOOL! I double over, gasping. The sandwich kid eyes me lazily and turns back to beard guy. 

“What kinda bread?”

What can it matter, young sandwich-maker?! WHAT CAN IT MATTER? THE CHAOS IS LOOSED UPON US! 

My skin jumps once and begins to crawl in earnest. I grasp the vestigial little ledge that is offered by the sandwich bar. Who in his right mind would say that? Move on to another sauce, you dumb brute! As I gasp and wince and gesture, the two security folk round the corner. They are familiar to me now. “Begone, sauce-shouters!” I cry with a banishing sweep of the arms. The taser darts leap at me trailing their little wires. I am flung into the air and the electrical charge briefly illuminates my cartoon skeleton. 

I shall remain undaunted.