Glass Slipper by Muldoon Elder

Hmmmmm... ... .. It must have been a very strong kind of glass not to shatter, even though Cinder-Ella was just a little slip of a thing.

And how was that Fairy Godmother able to coach a pumpkin to let itself be pulled by such mousey looking horses?

It was a good thing for Ella that she wore opaque nail polish to hide those dirty cinders under her fingernails that get under your skin when you're forced to make a clean sweep. Those cinders would have brushed off the Prince in a hell of a hurry.

I don't know about you, but for Ella, midnight was actually 11 P.M. in real time; boy-oh-boy, that daylight savings time switch can really screw up a good story! Let's see, normally it gets dark around 7 P.M. and light again around 5 A.M. so mid-way in between the two, mid-night would be midnight. But someone forgot to re-program the pumpkin to adjust for daylight savings time.

That's what caused all the trouble and made the German-to-French translator do such a hurried job that he got his French confused and wrote "verre" [glass] rather than the correct French word "vair" [fur]. Fur slipper makes a lot more sense than glass slipper and it wasn't even an ordinary kind of fur. Vair is an especially elegant type of fur, the bluish gray and white fur of a squirrel, which was particularly prized in medieval times.

One subtlety lost in translation, a bizarre twist nevertheless gained.

The French-to-English translator scratched his head in puzzlement when he came to "verre," but since he didn't have the original German to go by, he just went along with the French glass mistake. Even though it's an error, a glass slipper is certainly more memorable than a fur slipper but don't try to talk to a German about it, they won't know what the devil you're talking about and will assume that you're nuts, a word they learned another meaning of in the Battle of the Bulge toward the end of The Second World War.

Well, in the long run I suppose that turning fur into glass is a lot more credible than turning a pumpkin into a coach or a mouse into a horse. Maybe that's why we let it pass.

Stop grinning you booby, I meant the error not the horse. The next thing you know, we'll be hearing the one about the cannibal who passed the missionary in the jungle!