No wonder that the South has produced so many fine writers.
It also produces fine talkers, like my sainted mother.
She expressed herself with a fluidity of thought and
lucidity, laced with colorful metaphors, similes, and analogies, that a
Faulkner or a Fitzgerald would have been envious.
For example, she didn’t threaten simply to punish my many transgressions,
she promised she would cut a persimmon switch (or worse still, make me cut it)
and “wear you out.” Unlike modern politicians, she was not prone to idle
threats.
Some of her style of speaking came from the region.
A person didn’t sit with pride or arrogance. They sat there “like
Garrett on snuff.”
Something didn’t operate efficiently, it, ran “like a Singer
sewing machine.”
A person wasn’t dimwitted, their brain rolled around in
their head “like a BB in a barn.”
Someone wasn't driving fast, they were "sacking air."
Faced with an unpleasant task, I just had to “back my ears and
do it.” (If you don’t understand, ask a “horse-person”).
Someone didn’t prove annoying, they made one’s a** “crave
applesauce.” I ran into a variant of this when I married a girl from Lonoke,
Arkansas where “applesauce” was traded for “a dip of snuff.” Same message,
regional variation.
Other sayings were unique, as far as I can tell. When I
appeared in an unusually disheveled or unprepared manner, she would tell me “you
look like someone who was called for and couldn’t come, and when they got there
they wadn’t needed.” Now that is someone looking bad.
Sometimes, language seemed home-grown. Running a grocery
store along with her husband, she had a chance to connect buying habits with
social behavior. When a wealthy person came through, they weren’t simply rich, “they
didn’t ask the price of nothin’.” People with poor buying habits didn’t choose
poorly, “they didn’t buy one thing they really needed.”
A favorite expression, one that I use a lot, reportedly
originated with her father, whom I never met. A high-spirited man, from all
accounts, he once vowed, in a huff, to go and tell a neighbor “how the hog ate
the cabbage.” Reaching the front door, however, he turned and announced that he’d
better not, because, as he put it, “I’ve got my cows in his pasture right now.”
You just can’t express things better than that.
Oh, I think about that dear woman a lot, my bother. Standing
not much over five feet tall, she could make grown men tremble, fearing an
onslaught of her precise and colorful language. I also think about our language
skill, and where we are headed with them. People with her language skills are
disappearing.
John Steinbeck, in Travels With Charlie, expressed a fear
that technology would erase the variations in dialect among regions of America.
I worry, as well, about our skills in basic communication. You only have to
listen to young folks these days, and a frightening percentage of adults,
insert the word “like” three or four times into one sentence, for no reason
that adds meaning or emphasis, to see the danger facing our language skills.
More aggravating still is the replacement of any descriptor
of a superlative situation with the single, over-used, exasperating, maddening,
annoying, infuriating, irritating, galling, sophomoric, and vapid word “awesome.”
It grates.
After all, American English used so endearingly by
Wordsworth, Emerson, Twain, Hurston Ellison, Baldwin, Whitman, Cather, and
others—this excellent, magnificent, wonderful, marvelous, supreme, consummate,
outstanding, remarkable, fine, choice, first-rate, first-class, premier, prime,
unsurpassed, unequaled, unparalleled, unrivaled, preeminent language of ours—should
not be debased and violated by the lazy and speech-deprived.
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| A marvelous gift |
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