to fall between the cracks

When I was a teenager, I wrote the "teen" column (for over four years!) in The Virginian Pilot newspaper. The column started off being about "teen issues" (gay people are okay! dress codes suck!) and turned into a biweekly humor column.

Anyway, sometimes I look back over my crumbling newspaper clippings from the mid-1990s and read something I'd forgotten I ever wrote. Like this, from a 1995 column about quirks in the English language:

One astute reader recently brought to my attention the phrase "to fall between the cracks." It is a phrase often used in the political arena as a cry for federal dollars: We must help people who fall between the cracks of the welfare system or the health care system or the educational system.

"Between," however, means "in the interval separating." If you fall between the cracks, then you have a college degree, a stethoscope on your chest or a welfare check in the mail because you were lucky enough not to fall in the cracks. In other words, those between the cracks are sitting securely on firm wooden planks.

The disadvantaged who are, to extend the metaphor, writhing on the cold, hard ground beneath some federal boardwalk have either fallen "through the cracks" or "between the planks."

Me on the first day of tenth grade.
Photo credit: Mom