My sister accused me of being a suck-up after that last post. Hey girl: get a blog and you can suck up, too.

A number of years ago I read some sort of writers article. The kind where some old guy who's been writing and/or editing for eons tells you all his writing pet peeves. Everybody has those. My current one is the misuse of "myself." If I read one more memo that starts off, "Josephine, Heinrich and myself attended a meeting last week ... " I'm going to brain someone with a copy of Strunk and White. And that's not a big book so it'll take awhile.

One of this guy's peeves was use of the word: coffer. "No one has coffers anymore," he railed. "It's antiquated and a silly cliche."

Now this has become my pet peeve. I don't want it to be my pet peeve. At no time did "coffer" even blip the radar and now every time I see it I think: stupid cliche. Last week I read all these stories about city coffers, county coffers, state coffers -- newspapers reporters writing about government entities seem convinced there are coffers that are either being filled or, more often, woefully empty.

I checked to see if I could buy a coffer online. Here's a whole Coffer Corp company that manufactures a range of flanges.

What's a flange?