On the Flagrant Misappropriation of Synaesthetic Terminologies
Twilight Sparkle was nose-first in an enormous, old book, when Pinkie Pie popped up beside her. She didn't announce her presence at first, and spent a few minutes reading over Twilight's shoulder before she got bored and tapped her friend on the shoulder.
Twilight turned around slowly, expecting Spike. Instead, she got a face-full of Pinkie smile.
"Hi, Twilight!" Pinkie said. "What are you up to?"
Twilight sighed. It felt like she'd had this conversation several times before.
"Hi, Pinkie," Twilight said. She closed the book she had been studying, reasoning that further study attempts with Pinkie in proximity would probably prove fruitless. "I'm not really up to anything. I'm just kind of... stuck."
Pinkie Pie raised an eyebrow and tilted her head.
"Stuck? What's got you stuck?"
"Well," Twilight said, "I saw a sign when I was out walking today, and it kind of upset me."
"Like a magical sign, or a sign from fate, or something?"
Outside the library window, if you looked closely around the side wall, you could see a pony at the base of one of Ponyville's many rolling hills. That pony was Derpy, and she appeared to be pushing a large, grey boulder, similar in colour to herself, up the hill. Every few steps and turns of the boulder she'd take a break, and wipe the sweat off her forehead, and occasionally look up at the sun and smile.
"Pinkie, I know one of your main gags is to slightly-mishear whatever somepony else says and then lead off in a train of thought about your misunderstanding, but I have to point out that with sufficiently generous interpretations, I did see a sign from fate—albeit a particularly melodramatic one, perhaps."
Pinkie Pie blinked several times.
Twilight sighed.
"Alright, I'll just tell you about the sign. It was a sign selling fruit."
Pinkie Pie nodded.
"And the sign had a picture of an apple on it."
Pinkie Pie nodded again.
"And on the sign, next to the apple, it said 'fresh fruit'."
Pinkie Pie nodded thrice.
"I'm following you so far," she said.
Twilight sighed again.
"Underneath the picture of the apple and the words 'fresh fruit', it said... 'assorted flavours'."
Pinkie Pie nodded.
A moment of silence passed before Pinkie realized that was all there was.
Outside, Derpy and her boulder were halfway up the hill. Derpy was resting one side of herself on the rock, with her gaze turned towards the town of Ponyville, looking over the many houses and ponies milling about and besides them. They looked like streams of water, from very far away.
"Uh... Twilight? I think you forgot to finish your story."
Twilight shook her head.
"No, Pinkie. I didn't. The sign said 'assorted flavours'. Of fruit."
"So?" Pinkie Pie shrugged. "What's the problem with that?"
Twilight opened the book she'd been reading, grumbled under her breath, slammed the book with a hard 'snap', then crossed her forelegs in front of her chest and frowned.
"You can't have a 'flavour' of fruit! A fruit has a flavour. The sign made no sense at all!"
"But you knew what they meant, right?"
"That's not the point!"
Twilight buried her head in her hooves. Pinkie Pie pondered generally, letting herself watch a few particles of dust dancing through the afternoon sunlight that was pouring in through the window.
"Is this like when you kept getting upset about whether or not 'blue' was a flavour?"
Twilight lifted her head and looked at Pinkie with a deadpan stare.
"Please don't remind me about that, Pinkie. I still haven't come to a satisfying existential conclusion regarding 'colors as flavours' yet."
"Ooh, or the grilled-cheese thing?"
A nervous tick went off in Twilight's left eye, and her head twitched a little before returning back to center.
"If you make a sandwich," Twilight said, slowly, calmly, more of either than felt natural, "and you put cheese on it, you have a cheese-sandwich. Correct?"
Pinkie Pie nodded.
Finally, with a triumphant-sounding grunt, Derpy shoved her big circular rock and toppled it into place at the top of the hill. She took a bigger break, sitting down on the boulder and catching her breath, soaking up the sunlight and cooling off in the summer breeze.
"And if you make a sandwich with tomato on it, and you grill that tomato-sandwich, you have a grilled tomato-sandwich, right?"
"Twilight," Pinkie said, "maybe you've just been spending too much time cooped up in the library. We could go for a walk if you wanted, it's really nice out today—"
"And if you take your cheese-sandwich, and grill it, why does it then become a 'grilled-cheese' sandwich? You don't grill the cheese, then put it on the sandwich."
"I think it's just where the hyphen ended up. If you say 'grilled-cheese', you can just leave off the sandwich part."
"It's not about the hyphen; it's about the pronunciation. Everypony says 'grilled-cheese, sandwich'. It should be 'grilled, cheese-sandwich. I'm serious about this."
At the bottom of many of the other hills nearby were other rocks, each similar to the first Derpy had rolled up.
Inside, Pinkie Pie had pulled out a dictionary and was flipping through it. When she found the page she was looking for, she stopped and held the book out to Twilight.
"Look," she said. "It can be punctuated multiple ways—"
"Pinkie!"
Twilight scattered a few errant pages with a burst of her magic as she yelled, and Pinkie had to duck under a particularly-fast-flying copy of Equestrian Ailments and Diseases.
"You're missing the point entirely," Twilight said, the exasperation creeping into every syllable. "These are just small examples. Ponies everywhere are using language in newer and stupider ways every day, and if nopony does anything about it, eventually, it will be impossible to understand each other. If you can buy 'assorted flavours' of fruit, you may as well buy 'assorted flavours' of book. Or carriage. Or... dirt."
"I'd try flavoured dirt," Pinkie said. "It'd probably taste better than the regular kind."
When Derpy had finished her break, she went down to the base of another hill, sized up the boulder in front of her, and began to push.
"I'm starting a committee to promote the intolerance of language misuse," Twilight said. She gathered up the books and papers she'd been at the desk with, wearing a confident expression, as though she'd finally made up her mind. "We'll have banners and buttons by the end of the day. And by Celestia, so help me, I will get that stupid fruit sign taken down once and for all. The world needs to know they can't use words however they want."
It was hot outside, so Derpy took a drink of water. She liked drinking water when she was hot.
