"body-mass-index-neutral"

Garson O'Toole adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM
Sun Apr 1 14:53:20 UTC 2012


> Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>On public radio the other evening: a scientific report finds that eating
>>chocolate can be "body-mass-index-neutral."

> Joel S. Berson said
> Maybe they meant it doesn't make you shorter.

The radio commentators were sharing important observations about chocolate:

Sometimes consuming chocolate does make an individual shorter, but he
or she also loses weight. The decreased values are balanced so the
body-mass-index (BMI) remains invariant.

Sometimes eating chocolate does increase the weight of an individual,
but he or she also grows taller. The changes are balanced so that the
fundamentally important BMI measure is preserved.

Sometimes an individual is encased in chocolate and the BMI is locked in place.

On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 9:48 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: "body-mass-index-neutral"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 4/1/2012 08:55 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>On public radio the other evening: a scientific report finds that eating
>>chocolate can be "body-mass-index-neutral."
>>
>>In ordinary terms, that seems to mean, essentially, "non-fattening," a word
>>that none of the two or three people inviolved in the story deigned to use.
>
> Maybe they meant it doesn't make you shorter.
>
> Joel
>
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