Grammar Moses: When all you have is leftovers

If you're like me, you've actually found the end of Netflix. And you're blazing through "The Office" at a clip of six episodes a night, thoroughly enjoying all of them with the exception of the Ed Helms period.

So comfortable reruns are your friend, right?

With that in mind - and because my brain feels like a bowl of unset Jell-O late this Friday afternoon - I am going to serve you up a couple of my favorite leftovers from last year.

Hey, it's better than nothing, right?

To serve man

Though it was first aired two months before my birth, "To Serve Man" remains my favorite episode of "The Twilight Zone."

It's likely because of the satisfying ironic ending that even as a youngster I foresaw.

You remember the one: Seven-foot-2 Richard Kiel, who would go on to play the heavy in a couple of James Bond films, plays a Kanamit, a race of alien giants. He visits Earth during a time of great upheaval here - famine, energy shortages and nuclear proliferation - and offers the United Nations ways to ease strife with the Kanamits' advanced technology.

He leaves behind a book in his native language that earthly cryptographers set to work deciphering.

We soon learn that the title is "To Serve Man."

Great, everyone thinks, they're here to help.

The humans try the technology, and it works. The Kanamits start arranging visits to their home planet so we can learn more about them.

As our lead character - the cryptographer - starts to board the spaceship, one of the code breakers shouts: "Mr. Chambers, don't get on that ship! The rest of the book 'To Serve Man,' it's ... it's a cookbook!"

Huzzah! There is more than one definition of "to serve." In this case, the assumption was that the Kanamits wanted to perform duties for Earthlings. In reality, the book was filled with recipes for how to prepare them for brunch.

Three years ago I wrote about the lifesaving qualities of commas. Consider the change in meaning of "Let's eat, Grandma" if you were to remove the comma. Or "Have you eaten, my child?"

Both of these are cases of cannibalism. The "Twilight Zone" episode, however, is not. Cannibalism is specifically intraspecies snacking, and the Kanamits were not Homo sapiens.

I have had it

Last month I wrote about when you might string together "had" more than once in a sentence.

That inspired reader Keith Evans to nine-up me.

"Someone gave me a book years ago called 'Games for the Super-Intelligent,'" he told me. "The challenge was to punctuate the following to make sense:

"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher."

This book is not in my personal library, and I doubt whether any self-respecting librarian would allow me to check it out.

That's my explanation for not checking Keith's work. He says he memorized the solution, which his hippocampus has tucked away for 40 years.

Wrap your brain around this, based on the scenario that James and John were being tested on the use of "had" or "had had" and James correctly used "had had":

James, while John had had "had" had had "had had." "Had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.

That's 11 hads in a row.

In the spirit of one-upsmanship, once I was able to make sense of Keith's answer, I said, "Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh!"

If this is what Keith does for fun, I imagine he willingly watched last Sunday's ENTIRE Bears/Saints football game and that his choice of gridiron snacks was a bowl of unsalted plantain chips washed down with cucumber water.

Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.