Life & Mortality Quote by Erma Bombeck

Bombeck turns a hat into a tiny monument to everyday self-consciousness: the object is ready-made confidence, but the wearer isn’t. The comedy hinges on that sly mismatch between what the hat promises (grace, femininity, dignity) and what real life delivers (awkwardness, doubt, the fear of looking like you’re trying too hard). By comparing the hat’s vibe to “attending a state funeral,” she skewers how women’s “proper” accessories can feel less like personal expression and more like ceremonial costume - something you’re supposed to perform correctly, under imagined public scrutiny.

The line “or something” is classic Bombeck: it punctures the grandiosity she just built. She lets herself flirt with the fantasy of elevated adulthood, then immediately undercuts it, like she’s embarrassed to admit she wants to be taken seriously. That self-deflation is the point. It makes the insecurity legible without turning it into a sob story.

Culturally, this lives in the late-20th-century domestic terrain Bombeck owned: middle-class womanhood where style is both aspiration and minefield, where respectability is marketed but confidence isn’t included in the box. Carrying the hat instead of wearing it becomes a perfect metaphor for deferred selves - the version of you that exists in the closet, purchased and preserved, waiting for a day when you’ll feel authorized to inhabit it. The joke lands because it’s not about hats; it’s about permission.