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MIGHTY WHITE

Jan G. wrote (in indented blue):

I am also stuck calling black Americans "black." Being of Irish and Scottish descent, I am now no longer "white," I am a "European-American" but "Euro-American" will be fine. You too are now an "E-A" and don't forget it you "honky mama!" ~ Your fellow honky mama, "E-A" friend

Scottish-American, if you please. I'm not joining the European Union. Honk honk.

Well ok, you're Scottish-American. Perhaps I too should not join the European Union as I am, after all, a fellow "islander." I guess that makes me a Scotch-Irish-American or a Scottish-Irish-American and a Native-American since I was also born here. So now I am a Scottish-Irish-Native-American-honky-chick. If I wanted to stay a part of the European Union, that would make me a Scottish-Irish-European-Native-American-honky chick. I'm so confused. All this "politically correct" stuff makes my butt ache....

OK, then I'm a Scottish-Native American-Cherokee-who knows what else-American honkette.

By the way, "honky" is not only an insulting black/Afro-American word for white person. I'm sure it's related to a word my mother and her siblings used back in the hills to refer to foreigners and foreign languages, "hunky" and "hunky talk". I always suspected the black word "honky" stemmed from their feeling that nasal European-American speech sounded like ducks honking. But I think the hillbilly "hunky" must have evolved from the word Hungarian.

However, www.yourdictionary.com says honky could be a "blend of Wolof honq, red, pink, of light complexion, and hunky," Wolof being a West African language, and hunky "a disparaging term for a person, especially a laborer, from east-central Europe," possibly from bohunk, which combines Bohemian and Hungarian.

In the interest of inclusiveness and diversity, I refer you to the Fighting Whites intramural team of the University of Northern Colorado. Too long have we fought and played with the borrowed plumage of other great warriors, such as Indians, Vikings, Tigers, Senators, and so on. We non-diverse types have quite the pretty tradition of blood-thirst ourselves. (Did you know there used to be a baseball team called the Boston Doves? And one called the Brooklyn Bridegrooms?)

SCOTTISH-AMERICAN

It's not all kilts and haggis. The Scots-Irish contribution to the development of this country hasn't been fully acknowledged. According to Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by James Webb, this is because historically, the Scots, at least, have had strong clan loyalties but were not nationalists. Scots in America don't promote themselves the way other ethnic groups do, because they don't primarily identify themselves as such. For more on the great Scots, try:

How the Scots Made America by Michael Fry

How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman

And, according the Wikipedia entry on the English language, "The closest living relative of English is Scots (Lallans), a West Germanic language spoken mostly in Scotland and parts of Northern Ireland. Like English, Scots is a direct descendant of Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon."

MAMMY JANE

The Legend of Mammy Jane: An uneducated girl becomes the lady of the manor in Appalachia is a somewhat fictionalized biography of a distant family connection of mine, written by her granddaughter, Sibyl Jarvis Pischke. Mammy Jane's son Newt Jarvis married my grandfather's sister Stella Douglas. I met them when I was a kid. Sibyl is not a professional writer, and I was copyediting like mad all the way through it, but I couldn't put it down.

Jane was a poor illegitimate girl who married a widower with four children and then had a lot more children herself. They had nothing, but she was shrewd, thrifty, and hard-working, and started buying up other farms around their property, and they prospered.

I discovered that Mammy Jane was the old woman who used to intimidate my dad as a boy. He said when he walked up the dirt road, she would be sitting on her front porch watching the road, and holler, "Whose boy air you?" He tried to sneak past her but didn't always make it. Being well brought up, he'd have to stop and talk with her if she spotted him. These were the days after Mammy Jane's husband, Tom Jarvis, had died, and her large family was grown and gone, except for Dock, Sibyl's father, who ran a little store and moonshine tavern out of his house.

Some of my cousins said the story in the book about Jane killing a peddler is true; she used to point her pipe and say, "I could take a walk and find his grave afore this pipe would go out."

A writer once told me, "The fiction about fiction is that it's fiction." This book is semi-fiction, just like your family stories.

FOR SERVICE SPEAK ENGLISH

There's been a bit of trouble locally about a bar owner who has this sign outside or in his bar: "For service, speak English." Someone complained, although apparently not any of his Mexican customers, whom he does serve. Presumably they've learned how to say "beer" (or Bud or Corona or Dos Equis). People are trying to apply the laws for government-funded organizations to his private business, or comparing him erroneously to the shops and factories of a century or more ago that had signs like "Irish need not apply" and so on. If I moved to Mexico, I'd learn to say "cerveza" pretty quick. In fact I'm ready now. Una cerveza, por favor. On the other hand, if I had a bar, I wouldn't hang that sign. But I would defend to the death, or anyway reasonably far, this guy's right to his sign. If I had a bar, I'd just correct everyone's English. No grammar, no service.

Fred has occasion to give driving directions to Mexican truck drivers who speak almost no English. The DMV gives written driver's license tests in Spanish, and perhaps even provides translators for the driving test. Well, I used to know an old Oklahoma cowboy named Charlie Culver who never learned to read or write, except for his name and numbers, and he drove all his life.

Speaking of bars, during a recent visit to a historic house which had a store and tavern on the lower level, I learned that the word "bar" came from the bars of a cage that protected the liquor when the tavern was closed. The bars resembled the bars of a bank teller's window, but covered a larger area.

IS KENTUCKY SPINNING? IS PARIS BURNING?

Saturday night, tornados hit parts of Indiana and Kentucky, causing loss of property and life. No doubt it was all George W.'s fault. In fact, his face was seen inside the wind funnels. Look for photos in the next National Enquirer.

Bush is probably to blame for the rioting in France, too, even though France is not a U.S. ally in the Iraq war. It seems the rioters were motivated by the deaths of two young Muslim fellows who were electrocuted on an electric fence as they were running from the police, or only thought police were chasing them. I've heard the French police are not allowed to shoot guns. Without the threat of force, I can't see what they can do when they're outnumbered by people who will use force. It's time for the surrender drills, Citizens.

Perhaps rather than imposing a curfew, the French police could follow the example of the crew of the cruise ship Spirit of the Seabourn Cruise Line, who repelled pirates off the coast of Africa by using a non-lethal sonic weapon. The pirates were no doubt frustrated by the lack of job opportunities on or in the ocean and by their lack of assimilation into the cruise ship culture.

SNIDELY MARMISH

Dave DaBee wrote (also bluish):

"A rap of the PO Ruler to..." could be a recurring feature. A more marmish version of the "Dope Slap" item on WBZ Radio a few years ago. The "columnist" would say, with Snidely Venom: "And a dope slap to Congressman Willy Hooha, who said in committee last week that ...."

The problem is that it wouldn't be just a PO feature, entire editions could be construed as knuckle-rapping.

Retreat: The Essence of Christian Mysticism

Bernadette Roberts

I am organizing a workshop with Bernadette Roberts, a remarkable Christian contemplative and author of three books:

The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center

The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey

What is Self? : A Study of the Spiritual Journey in Terms of Consciousness

This retreat, called The Essence of Christian Mysticism, will be held on the weekend of May 5-7, 2006, in Loveland, Ohio. For more information, go to Bernadette Roberts Retreat (www.keithops.us/brretreat.htm). NOTE: The web page has been changed to allow viewing with different kinds of browsers.

If you buy these or any other books from Amazon, using the link below, I'll get a tiny commission, and I'd appreciate it.

Link here to look for books on Amazon.com!

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