At one time, some brands of lip salve came in tiny round screw-top
boxes. This was handy in a New York winter; a Chapstick in my pocket
often got too hard to apply, but lip salve meant to be put on with a
fingertip could be rubbed until it thawed.

After my bottle of olive oil leaked all over my tool kit, I began to
carry a lip-salve box filled with Eucerin (original formula: almost
thick enough to slice) for cleaning my hands after fixing a flat.

I've stopped carrying a spare tube, but I still carry the sole
remaining lip-salve box; now it's filled with A&D ointment, and I
carry it in my pocket. A&D is better at cleaning and also heals
shallow injuries. And if it's in my pocket, I can use it to clean off
the chainwheel print when I change into walking shoes.

I ran through a lot of Subway napkins on Wednesday (5 July) -- I
unshipped my chain, among other things, but the chain dirt came off
with just the napkin.

--------------------------

I've seen clear-plastic boxes very like lip-salve boxes in
craftsy-waftsy stores (but not lately), and once I saw them at Sally's
Beauty Supply labeled "empty nail-art boxes".

"A + D Ointment" is a mixture of petrolatum (petroleum jelly),
lanolin, and cod-liver oil. Knock-offs usually add the word "vitamin"
and change "+" to "&" to avoid trade-mark infringement. The last tube
I bought went a step further: it changed the maroon background for
pinky orange, and called it "Vitamin A&D Diaper Rash Ointment".

Subway is a chain of fast-food restaurants; the name is a pun on
"submarine sandwich", which is customarily abbreviated to "sub". The
chain started in New York and until recently sported wallpaper that
was a map of the New York subway system. On my last visit (on
Wednesday), the menu still included one of the sandwiches that were
named after subway routes. It's a good place to get a nice big hunk
of bread.

---------------------------

I'm tempted to cross-post this to alt.usage.english -- I dithered so
over whether to say "unshipped" "shipped" or "re-shipped". The
incident was unshipping, but it was shipping that got my fingers
dirty.

On an international forum, I suspect that my best bet would be to get
wordy and say "I had to put my chain back on the chainwheel".

When I first heard the term, at least forty years ago, the speaker
elided the "un", and I heard "'shipped chain" as "shipped chain".
Considerable confusion until I looked it up.

--
Joy Beeson, U.S.A., mostly central Hoosier,
some Northern Indiana, Upstate New York, Florida, and Hawaii
joy beeson at comcast dot net http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/
The above message is a Usenet post.
I don't recall having given anyone permission to use it on a Web site.