First of all, dictionaries are great.

I know spending a few minutes with a gigantic doorstop of a book — a book so thick and big it could stop a bank vault door — doesn’t sound like the coolest, sexiest thing to do (even if you use it to look up words like “sex”, which we all did in fourth grade), but I wanted to write something here about the Middle-Eastern vegetarian paste everyone loves called hummous, and I didn’t know how to spell it.

Now, I had the laptop on, and I could’ve just googled it, and I almost did, but then the crabby old Samuel Johnson fan rose in me, and I walked around the desk (daily exercise for too many of us) and took a stack of scripts off my handy Webster’s Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition. (Those six words alone almost are a dictionary.)

And hummous wasn’t in it. It’s a 1979 edition, which, I guess, is just a touch before falafel stands began springing up all over America, if “springing up” is the right phrase, and there was nothing even close.

So I zipped over to Google, which had lots of recipes and references and leads and paths — as Google always does, for good or ill — and found it spelled both hummus and hummous. This is not surprising, since the word itself is probably transliterated from Hebrew or Arabic (or both), and doesn’t correspond to English quite as neatly as, say, “brownies” or “hot dog”.

Here’s why I wanted to write about hummous. I had some yesterday on the set of “Ten Things”, and realized something about the stuff I never noticed before:

The first three bites of hummous are the best food in history; bites four through ten are impossible.

What I mean is this. Most of us had probably eaten hummous thousands of times, and as soon as you see the platter — like me, yesterday — you get a big smile. You think, “Hey, great, look at that, cold cucumbers, peppers, green beans, tomatoes, all arrayed in a wagon wheel, and at the center, a big bowl of hummous! What a great energy snack. Much better than muffins or cookies, or whatever else I could have.” And this is correct. The actual hummous has (just guessing) olives and oil and garlic and chick peas and cheese (?) and lots of ground something-or-other, and between that and the cold veggies you scoop it up in, it’s a great afternoon snack, a healthy alternative, a nourishing choice, and a great excuse to drink heavily later.

Well. Anyway, it was three hours after lunch and three hours before I’d be leaving, so it came at a perfect time. And those first three bites did not disappoint. Tasty, nutricious… even fun to spoon and spread.

But right after that? Boy, the hummous pleasure drops right off, doesn’t it? It quickly tastes tired and spicy and annoying, and is entirely too much of a chore. Hey, I’m sorry, but that is no food to build a civilization on. All the camera operators and sound mixers and actors came over to that table with big smiles and walked away with frowns.

In fact, you eat enough hummous, if you overdo it, if you hit the hummous wall, you actually start thinking the best thing to do might just be to load up a truck with dynamite and drive it into a building — preferably one that makes hummous.

And yet the next time I see it I’m sure it’ll look like the greatest food ever again. There’s no memory with hummous. You’re ready again. I think that’s because in our country we only eat it once every year or so. All those places in the Middle East? They must have it every day.

That’s the biggest issue to address in Iraq and Syria and Iran and Afghanistan. These people don’t need democracy. They need hamburgers.

AND THEN… I went back to the dictionary and saw “humus”, which is not hummous. “Humus” is 1) the earth, the ground, the soil; the black substance resulting from the decay of leaves and other vegetable matter.”

Which is just what hummous tastes like after the third bite! Gad! Eureka!

REMEMBER: IF YOU WALKED OUT OF BED TODAY AND HAD ENOUGH TO EAT WHERE YOU CAN MAKE JOKES ABOUT IT… FOLKS, THE GAME’S OVER, AND YOU’VE WON A LOAF OF PITA BREAD.