No,no, thank YOU for being a friend...

After watching a rerun of an old "Golden Girls" episode, I decided it was high time to track down one of life's most puzzling questions. What the heck is a linai, and why are the Golden Girls the only ones who have ever had one?

I started with the dicitonary. Blanche's "linai" always looked like a patio to me. What's the difference? Problem: I don't even know how to spell "linai." I've never seen it in print before. Those four old ladies were the only ones I've ever heard even use the term. I tried a few attempts, but it didn't seem to be in my dictionary. Damn you Mrs. Merriam-Webster! Let's try the thesuaraus! Surely Mister Roget would mention it in the patio entry. No luck.

Googling "linai" and all its possible spellings results in many foreign language sites and random people named Ms. Linai Chu or Mr. Amara Linai. I supose I could always call them and ask what their names meant. But that seemed silly.

So my last resort was to go the dreaded fan-site community. These people always scare me. There are whole subcultures of people out there who are obsessed with random crap, like "Caroline in the City" and the career of Delta Burke and devote page after page of terrible websites to their random trivia. (Did the pot just call the kettle black here? Bah!) These are just the sort of freaks who would help me out!

So after a quick trip to one of these sites and I found an old episode script- the one where Dorothy's college lesbain friend comes to visit and falls in love with Rose- where they reference the linai. My spelling was correct. After quite a few google searches, I found the elusive definition.

A linai is a veranda or patio furnished and used as a living room. The term is Hawaiian in origin. It's also the name of a Hawaiian island where they grow much of the world's supply of pineapples. It is supposedly archaic at this point, so being that the ladies were horribly old, they might be the last surviving people who could comfortablely reference the word. Not anymore! That show single-handedly kept the linai-manufacturers in business and the term in circulation for a whole new generation. Cheesecake for everyone! My work here is done.