A few notes on the Language

I must have been in my playpen, forty some-odd years ago, when the phrase "It's not what you said, it's the way you said it" was introduced to my lexicon. Perhaps, there are those of you that would prefer i use the term Broca's Area, but either way it's where we store our language. The interesting part of this is in the transport and delivery of language. Don't let me lose you, yet! This isn't going to be one of those dry academic things, more to the point it's going to be a quick examination of some language oddities that are on my mind. Oh Boy! I used the word quick didn't i?? Well, like the man said, "You get what you pay for." Back to, it's not what you said, it was the way you said it. Since the transport of our language is a living being, so must our language also be a living being. For instance the devolution of expletives for happiness or joy: sweet, dope, fly, awesome, cool, far out, peaches, berries, capital, and the like. Ah would a rose by any other name... Okay, so chalk that one up to generational catch phrases. How about the way technology has effected the language. if you misspell emulate (to mimic or attempt to pay homage to) you will end up with immolate (to destroy, usually by fire) another good one is rife (meaning a great amount of) and you get ripe (ready for harvest). These two can have overlapping contextual agreement. One could use either word to describe a quantity. Finally, we come to ascetic and aesthetic. The former is a person who trains in self denial and mortification and the latter is of beauty and what's pleasing to the eye. I'm not even sure i can find a parallel for those. Make no mistake, i'm not an English snob. If you look for grammatical problems in my writing, i promise you'll find them. I am the King of the Comma Splice.


All of this has been merely prologue to a few of my personal pet peeves. These are in no particular order and i hope you get some kind of giggle out of these. First off there is "alot". Alot is not a word. It is two and as two it doesn't mean many or several. However, many and several do substitute for alot just fine. Next, I want to remind y'all that y'all is spelled y'all. The argument has been made that y'all isn't a word either and the only reason it is in the dictionary is for common usage. WRONG! If you want to blame someone for y'all, then blame Queen Isabella of Spain. She needed to unite her country and commissioned a man named Nebrija to write the first Grammar. It is in this the Spanish form of the, plural and singular(in some cases) second person pronoun (you) (vosotros) was set down and hence, y'all is ours through assimilation.


Which leads me to my favorite email of the week. Yes! i'm telling secrets out of school.


I received the following:


Dude like my bff and me was hangin at the park just kickin and like her genes ript omg so funny cause her azz wuz hangin out and everything can you sew up her azz call me


In a word, WOW!!! I don't know if they need a geneticist or a seamster. So, i replied to my little friend with the following:


Dude, If she's over eighteen and has a good personality, bring her over and let me see if i can get her under the presser foot.


Remember, it's not what you say, but how you say it. I wonder if she'll want quilting stitches on her azz.......Y'all be great, D

Sometimes it's the cake (warning goofy prose alert)

Sometimes it's the Cake

It wasn’t long after Cam told the Pope to kiss his ass that Stevie B., started coming around. I always saw her as something of a predator. Not in the sense of when a bear lumbers in a stream to fish out salmon, but more like a buzzard that hates carrion. She’d circle and circle and in that last moment of life she’d take hers. You might think of it like the loud ass brother-in-law that circles the turkey on Thanksgiving so as soon as everyone’s back is turned he can scavenge a morsel or begin pecking out the last remnants of flesh still clinging to the bone.
Cam wasn’t his real name, just a handle he went by because he hated his name. At least, that’s what we all believed. Cam wasn’t his whole nick name either. Cam is short for Camo, which is short for camouflage. We called him that since we were kids. His dad had tons of Army grease paint left over from his reservist days, the kind they use to camouflage their faces with, and Cam wouldn’t play “Forts” with us without it. This usually meant we had to wait on him to get it just right. He always said, “Heavy on the bone, light on the meat.” Something his dad undoubtedly picked up being in the Army Reserves, though none of us knew what it meant. So Camouflage was shortened to Camo, and then to Cam and it stuck. Just so you know, his real name is Grant Lee Eisen-something-or-other. I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem all that bad to me, but then again I was the only white kid in the neighborhood and my name is James Brown. Like they say, nobody’s perfect.
For some time, Cam had been in a downward spiral. I say for some time. If you consider his high point as birth, then it has been a bit more than merely some time. On his eighth birthday, his older sister choked on a hotdog and died. It wasn’t really as simple as all that. She had been walking around with a hotdog in her mouth, the way kids do, when Cam, while swinging at the piñata, hit her in the mouth with the stick. When he brought the swing forward again the piñata split in half raining gold coin chocolates down over the flock of kids diving for the candy. In all the excitement, his father had missed the part where Cam’s sister had fallen to the ground. Cam’s mother died giving birth to him, so if it hadn’t been for the Pastor’s wife, his sister would probably still be lying there.
Eileen Underwalther, the Pastor’s wife and frequent visitor to the Eisen-Something-or-other house, called Mac’s attention to his unconscious daughter on the ground. Immediately, Mac sprung into action. He knew just what to do. He elevated her head and checked her for breathing. It was kind of hard to really discern what condition she was in given the location of the hotdog and the amount of blood on her face. He checked her for breathing and listened for a heartbeat, in the middle of all of us kids screaming. When he didn’t hear a heart beat, he started CPR. The Medical Examiner said there really wasn’t any way to know for sure she was alive when her rib punctured her lung, but just know he tried his hardest with all of his training to save her and didn’t. I guess what I remember most about that day is the cake was really good.

Sigh-ning all the papers that come home from school.

The guys came home yesterday with the usual stack of papers that require a parents signature. I LOATHE this day every year. It's a bunch of pointless crap for the most part. I mean why in the hell do i have to sign a copy of the code of conduct, i'm not going to school there? As long as i'm familiar with what it says is that not good enough?? It's like when they took the sodas out of the school vending machines or cupcakes at in class parties cause they make kids fat. Are you kidding me?? I mean really we have to make sure johnny doesn't get fat from eating cupcakes at a class party, but they serve fried burritos covered in nacho cheez in the lunch room. I'd really love to meet the person that finds the fried burrito more healthy than a cupcake.
Something new for us this year, but probably not for the rest of the world cause our school district is five years or more behind any trend, was the racial/ethnicity updated survey. They have incorporated the one that was started under Reagan and passed by king george; hell it could have even have been Clinton. There are two parts that just annoy the hell out of me. First is the Hispanic/Latino or Not Hispanic/Latino question. That is the ethnicity portion. There are no other ethnic divisions worth noting, obviously or they would have been included. Well, for me this is a murky ass question. If you think of all the Ethnic markers for Hispanic/Latino, we certainly fall into that category. However, as it is defined by the OMB and the statisticians, most of the people i know would fall into this ethnic group. You know what, i don't have a problem with that. What i have a problem with is that it's either that or nothing else. The question is, is this really necessary??
The other weirdo part is under the race category. I absolutely abhor this one. Now before i get to it, i'll say that part of my ancestry is from Scotland and part is from the Creek and Cherokee that went to Spanish Florida and my wife is, for lack of splitting hairs here, Lebanese. This is where the Race section is just wacked. The White box is for anyone that is descendant of the peoples of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Let's see Scotland is Europe so White and Lebanon is North Africa, so White again. Does this make all Lebanese White?? What about those people from Egypt or Dubai, are they White also?? WEIRDNESS!!!!!
So, We are Hispanic/Latino and White. I hate being labeled. Would it not have made a hell of a lot more sense to just put a NATIVE TEXAN box?? Now that's a label i not only can live with i am proud of.
Oh and for those of you thinking, what about the Native American box?? Well you only get to claim that status if you have lineal documentation to one of the nations. Really and truly that is something that i should have as i am the family historian and have tons of information about those that came before me, but there was a census done after the Seminole war stopped, note not ended, it just stopped. In that census my ancestors were worried about reprisals or worse and adopted the names Johnson and Williamson from people they admired. That census was to get an accurate count on the peoples of what had been Spanish Florida and family history, customs and traditions, the very identity of some families were lost forever from something as simple as that census. What will the ramifications of the new one be on the American Ethnicity's in the decades ahead?? I'm sure i don't have the answer, but what really sucks is that i'm sure they don't either.