Since childhood I have derived mild amusement from reading the muffled, muzzled language of receipts. It is like a code. After the immediate memory of a purchase has faded it can become a project to decipher the space-sensitive names of each item.

I imagine anthropologists and historians of the future analyzing this receipt, debating the significance of the number "762", followed by a dash as it inexplicably appears before a drumstick, that item mysteriously truncated to "UMSTICK". What does it mean? they ask -- no, they implore: What does it mean? And what of the loose number 0 hanging over the store name? Why is it there? What does it mean?

The conciseness of printed receipts as a cultural relic is quite different from today's explosion of words, our modern digital grandiloquence that will never fill the infinite column inch of the Internet.

Different, too, is the relative un-alterability of these documents. Errors on receipts are corrected by hand, with pen or pencil, evoking the cutting, judgmental drama of a grade school teacher's comments on a short story or vocabulary quiz.

By my interpretation the "762-" looks like the start of a telephone number. Possibly it is an area code, and the message communicated here is to call 762-UMSTICK. 762 is an early-twentieth-century overlay area code, meaning it has limited geographical significance. For the most part these area codes signify where you bought your cell phone, or which area code you requested at the time of purchase, but as often as not it does not represent a physical place from which a call is made.

But that is of no concern, really. I could call 762-UMSTICK to see what answers, but for the moment I shall take a pass.

SHREDD CHED sounds like a piece of farm equipment, or a bag of mulch, but it is really a bag of shredded cheddar cheese, probably of the Kraft brand. I used to buy cheese logs and shred the cheese myself, but it became too tedious. I was shredding cheese of comparable or equal quality to pre-shredded cheese sold in the same place, so I didn't see the value in shredding manually.

Shred is a great word that sounds more and more cynical and sarcastic the more gratuitously you drop it into sentences.

One shreds another person's argument.

I offer you shreds of sympathy.

Political ambitions torn to shreds.

What else but cheese does on buy in shreds?

Wheat.

Shredded wheat.

Fields of shredded wheat.