Say Prunes!

Such a happy prune.

Pretty much my whole life, whenever my dad took our picture, he'd tell us to say, "PFLAUMEN!" 

The German word for prunes, pflaumen sounded like "fly-men." 

Here are my grandparents, caught mid-pflaumen. The mere mention of pflaumen made anyone within my dad's Kodak Instamatic range crack up. He wanted real smiles and moments. But that still doesn't explain pflaumen, does it? Hang on, you. I'm getting to it. According to my dad, "in the olden days," photographers would tell their long-seated subjects to say, "Prunes," to achieve a nice smile. At some point, who knows when, the comedy writer changed prunes to pflaumen. Much funnier, don't you agree?