Daily Inspiration Quote by Erma Bombeck

Bombeck takes a harmless object - a kiwi fruit, already a little ridiculous with its “small, brown, hairy” specificity - and turns it into a miniature horror story about modern squeamishness. The joke isn’t simply that she overreacts; it’s that her overreaction feels weirdly plausible. She stages the fruit as a creature: thrown at her like an invasive pest, then “killed” with a wastebasket, as if it might scuttle away. The laugh lands in the gap between what a kiwi is (a trendy supermarket novelty by late-20th-century standards) and what it becomes in her mind (a hairy animal, a threat, an affront).

The intent is classic Bombeck: domesticate anxiety by exaggerating it until it’s manageable. Underneath, she’s poking at the era’s creeping cosmopolitanism - the moment when “exotic” foods started showing up in American kitchens and people were expected to act sophisticated about them. If you don’t know what to do with the new thing, you can at least convert your confusion into comedy. Her diction helps: “Someone once” makes it sound like a campfire tale; “until it was dead” mockingly upgrades a piece of fruit into a mortal enemy.

Context matters, too: Bombeck’s persona was the overwhelmed, clear-eyed observer of everyday absurdities, especially the domestic ones. Here, the wastebasket becomes a weapon of household order, a symbol of the home fighting back against the unfamiliar - not with bravery, but with slapstick panic.