A Greek tragedy is one that is inevitable, unavoidable. A Shakespearean tragedy is one that may not have happened if not for human decisions or failures.

A tragedy is where you find it. I believe it to be a scientific fact that whole, intact potato chips taste better than those chips that have broken in half or in some other way been disabled. After all, they’re called chips, not crumbs or bits or potato parts. I assume the original, full-scale chip design corresponds with the average size and circumference of your typical spud, and thus, the chip makers go to great lengths to make them so, fluffing the bags, cushioning them with air to provide a chip-pillowing effect and packing them in sturdy cardboard boxes where they are softly laid side by side like so many eggs in a carton.

Snack makers very badly want you to have a full chip. So there’s economic effort and design intent. Beyond that, I think a full, complete chip surface accentuates the salt, oil and crunch equation to deliver a taste complete and satisfying. Something about flavor dispersed over a larger surface area and allowing the tongue sensors to travel over a more complete, tastier terrain. Opening a new bag, gently shaking the contents onto a paper plate (from a bag-to-plate elevation that has been optimized to prevent injury) is a glorious thing, but, alas, a fleeting thing. Typically after the second or third shake, the intact chips will have all liberated themselves and – gasp! – the remaining lot will be comprised of only those chips that – gasp! – did not survive the journey intact. Here you’ll find one little chipped chip huddled next to the others, like preschoolers without coats, in a pile of chippy sawdust. At these times it will be best to admit that you have done all you can, bless their spuddy souls and move on to the next bag.

This chip logic is proof that, scientifically, you can consciously decide what to read but you cannot consciously decide to look at words and not read them.

Still, I’ve heard sillier theories. In the early 1900s, Horace Fletcher advocated “Fletcherizing,” the chewing of food until it becomes liquefied, yielding twice the nutrients and reducing by half what we need to eat. Horace wasn’t being facetious. He thought it a purely plausible solution to a myriad of problems, like satiating a hungry world and economizing what a soldier might have to carry into battle. (By the way, did you know the word facetious uses all the vowels in order.)

Do you know how many Wiffle balls go missing every year? Me neither, but I know that my three sons on a typical summer day were hitting them over the fence into impenetrable plant forms and generally making them disappear to the tune of about nine a day. We learned that the true definition of neighbor is: that person who keeps all balls hit into his yard. Pricks. I do happen to know that the official Wiffle ball and bat were invented in 1953 and every ball and bat is still made in that place, Shelton, Connecticut. The special yellow color is trademarked.

I guess a broken potato chip or a lost Wiffle ball aren’t really tragedies at all, maybe some people are just too attached to junk food and sports.