There are few things you'll need to know about me...

Here's one: I am an eternal child.

Actually, we're all eternal children; the child we once were lives on in all of us. Some of us are simply better at acknowledging this. In fact, I think we'd all be a lot better off were we to realize the joy of the child inside us. (The only problem with this is that it sounds far too much like something a guest on Oprah might write - and that ain't me, folks!)

One sign of this childlike nature I never seem to lose is my love of cookies.

Face it, folks, cookies are pretty damned wonderful. There they are... warm... chewy, yet a bit crispy...yyyyuuuummmm....... Cookies hold all of the goodness we once knew in our childhood. If you're like me, you loved to lick the bowl after your mom made a batch of cookies. You also loved to eat the cookie dough. Is it any wonder why cookie dough ice cream is so popular? Because there's a kid inside of us who can now GET AWAY WITH eating cookie dough!

Cookies are little packages of fun. Their sweetness is pervasive, invasive... and other words ending in "asive" that I can't stop to think about right now because I'm writing at work...

Cookies are the transport mechanism for such wonderfulness as chocolate chips, peanut butter, nuts, M&Ms, chocolate chips, and chocolate chips. (Okay! So, I like chocolate chip cookies!)

I think we can all agree on this.

So, why did we allow some rotten person to use the word "cookie" to describe the data web sites sometimes store on your hard drive? These cookies aren't tasty! They are, very often, a pain in the butt - with NO chocolate chips!!! Why do we continue to allow people to devalue our language like this? Works like "cookie" should be sacred. They hold a place in our memory from our childhoods and should not be messed with. The same with words like "love" and "liberty" and "freedom" and "election"...

Hmmm... "liberty", "freedom", "election"... words that have been sorely devalued of late.

Words are very important. They hold the key to who we are and how we see our world. Cookies are no longer tasty things with chocolate chips. Neither "liberty" nor "freedom" are no longer concepts that raise men above his past but now shackle him. "Election"... well, that term was drastically devalued in the last presidential debacle.

... I was talking about cookies, wasn't I?