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Perhaps this makes me a fussbudget, but I think there’s a relation between sloppy speech and sloppy thinking.

Mr. Sondheim’s first professional show business job was not in the theater at all; through the agency representing Hammerstein, he was hired to write for a 1950s television comedy, “Topper,” about a fussbudget banker haunted by a pair of urbane ghosts.

As the prissy fussbudget Martin Lomax prepares his beloved gardens for public gaze, he realizes that he needs to keep people away from the cesspit, now the final resting place of more than a few bodies.

I wouldn’t have minded that with James, whose fussbudget pomposity is always worth some deflation.

I’ve been known to string the so-called stringless varieties, too — perhaps 20 pods in a pound will have true end-to-end strings, but all have chewy strings on their ends, and I am a fussbudget.