I'd seen square plates at local Walmarts, but I had no idea that anyone actually used them, outside of the people in science fiction films who ate nondescript puddings out of their space trays. And if it was square, it absolutely had to be in tray-form, because you could portion out the food into the different areas that way. If you used the square plate, so often created with an exaggerated dip in the surface, anarchy would erupt, at least according to my 9-year-old, sheltered brain. The food would either slide down towards the middle or chaotically be unable to stay separated from the other foods.
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WHAT IS THIS SORCERY?!
A circular plate is logical. You could ration out the different locations on a circular plate. Every one of the Grandma Uncle's Country-Home-Cooked Barbecue Diner-type restaurants near my home used circular plates, and all the small-town, kick-your-boots-off-and-sit-a-spell, ain't-nothin'-wrong-with-hard-work-and-Jesus-Christ-Almighty food they served was arranged according to a sort of unspoken pie chart rule. Finally, and this is just aesthetics, but square plates stacked rigidly, while circular plates were warm, colloquial, and more likely to be enjoyed by Mark Twain.
Multiple types of the same kind of silverware also never made sense to me as a kid, as they were mainly reserved for slapstick scenes involving boorish men visiting the royal parts of England and not understanding that you can't talk about farts while at dinner with the Queen. Finding that I had the choice to not remember which was the salad fork and which was the dessert fork made me feel as if I had been thrust into the plot of My Fair Lady. The role of the redneck is used in the media as a way to either assert someone else's higher intelligence, or prove how much better the redneck lifestyle is than that of those boys from New York City, who might wear fancy suits and drink champagne but ain't never gazed at the beauty of the moon. Thus, many in the South assimilate this mindset, including my younger self. They become a living stereotype, because for their whole lives, they're either presented with the idea that they're being attacked by people looking to make a joke of them, or that they're fish out of water in the harsh, soulless machinations of an America that would be way better off if it had a Jack Palance character to impart valuable lessons to.
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"And that's why all the love you ever need resides in the heart of a lost calf."
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