Number 63
Years ago some writer lamented the fact that certain affluent high school students, born too late to have enjoyed the Vietnam war (in the sense of "he enjoys poor health"), confused the peace symbol with the Mercedes-Benz logo. The peace symbol, for the yutes out there, is a circle with four radii, one up and three down. Mercedes-Benz is a circle with three radii, one up and two down. A local Starbucks (is that redundant?) that displays art from a nearby elementary school is now exhibiting fourth-grade bean art ~ different kinds and colors of beans glued onto craft paper ~ and sure enough, one of them is a Mercedes-Benz symbol in beans. "Count beans, not bullets" ~ works for me.
Bro Sam reminded me of words commonly used by our grandparents that are less common today:
"haint" (haunt?) for a ghost . . . Of course we heard and even I used the word "yonder" . . . wherever that is. And of course if you looked like s**t you were "peaked" or had the "chilblains". ("Peaked" has two syllables, and according to www.yourDictionary.com, its origin is unknown.)
Sam continued with "another old/nonsensical word and phrase I've known forever and still love to invoke with no knowledge of where it came from. It describes a feeling that you know have and it's unmistakable. . . I'm talking 'cubby innards'."
"Innards" I know but "cubby" used here is a new one on me. He explained that it's the feeling that follows three B&Bs, chili, chips and salsa, ice cream, and a few beers.
Dave da Bee didn't like the idea of reintroducing archaic verb forms such as "lift" as past tense ("I lift up my eyes"), fearing it would confuse people and give them more excuses for incorrect English, which of course it would. He also wrote:
I had a REALLY nasty reaction to the rural Pennsylvania language of Mrs. L***, in my Binghamton childhood neighborhood: in a scratchy-screechy voice she'd say "Now y'uns stay outa the parlor ~ I just red it up!" Brrr . . . gives me shivers to think about it. (It didn't help that her sons were bully-vandals. At age 8 R***** actually got himself a particular model car kit specifically so he could break the pieces and glue it together so it matched a newspaper photo of a car that had smashed into a telephone pole. I am not making this up.
That boy is probably in prison today, if it's any comfort. But as for "red up," it must have been "redd up," as per www.yourDictionary.com:
[Middle English dialectal redden, to clear an area (influenced by Middle English redden, to rescue, free from), from Old Norse rydhja; see rid.] Regional Note: The terms redd and redd up came to the American Midlands from the many Scottish immigrants who settled there. Meaning "to clear an area or to make it tidy," redd is still used in Scotland and Northern Ireland; in the United States it is especially common in Pennsylvania as the phrasal verb redd up. The term, which goes back to Old Norse rydhja, can be traced from the 15th century to the present, particularly in dialects of Scotland and the North of England.
This bit of TV dialogue buzzed by me like a mosquito: "You fetch my meaning?" It sounds sort of down-home, but I've never heard it. Has anyone ever heard this in real life, or is this a script-writer's auditory hallucination?
And in a program about zoo animals: "We had to feed them and drink them." Logical, yes, but so wrong.
Well, not as old as Pilgrim's Progress ~ but I started to listen to an abridged version of Studs Terkel's interviews with aged people (over 70). I've read several of his collections and figured in this case an abridgement would be acceptable, but I couldn't get past the first half-hour. The interviews were read by actors. Maybe that was cheaper than finding and editing the original interview tapes ~ I'm assuming Terkel used tape and didn't just take notes, though I could be wrong. No matter how good an actor is, he or she sounds artificial compared to a person speaking his or her own words. The acting made the interviews boring before I had a chance to get tired of them. Reading the Terkel interviews allows me to imagine the voice; and when an actor reads a work of fiction, that's what I expect ~ fiction. But this didn't work for me.
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