St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone. The last of the green beer has been drunk, the final skirt wearer unskirted, and the last drunk reveler put to bed. Yet oddly, I still have shamrocks and leprechauns on the brain. The reason: a silly bit of St. Pat’s Tomfoolery that has me perplexed.

Last Tuesday when I arrived at my job for St. Patrick’s Day I was greeted by several people declaring their preparedness to pinch me. Why? Because that’s what you do in Seattle when someone doesn’t wear green on St. Paddy’s Day. I was flummoxed.

“Is this pinching business some kind of weird Washington St. Patrick’s tradition?” I inquired, “because I’ve never heard of it.”

“Of course not,”came the chorus of reply, “everyone does it!”

“What!?” I cried, “It can’t be.”

Immediately I prepared my strategy for discovering the truth: mass E-mails and a bevy of phone calls. Surely I wasn’t the only person from New Jersey who had managed to avoid the pesky pinching peril of this ridiculous faux St. Paddy’s tradition for his entire life.

The results however were startling.

What I imagined was an isolated incident of Washington weirdness is in fact, anything but. My exhaustive polling found that individuals from Ohio, Texas, Indiana, Minnesota, California, Texas, and Montana all confirm the sad truth: pinching is practically an American tradition. An American tradition, that is if you’re not from New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, all of whose citizens stood by the Muoio party line: this pinching business is hogwash. Good work, comrades. Good work.

So there it is, the old saying “you learn something new everyday” once again rearing its mind-blowing head. I can’t say I’m thrilled with my latest personal revelation but it sure has made for some interesting water cooler talk. And really, that’s part of what makes this strange world of ours so much fun.