Here at the Arbor Springs Old Folks Hotel, I explained to my friends why I stopped watching the news back in April of this year. Yes it was partly for my peace of mind, but it was then that I realized the news was also starting to BORE me. It’s certainly not that things aren’t happening in the world, in fact I feel like the world needs to take one big time out. Everyone go to your corner for a minute so we can all have some peace of mind! No, we’re bored because the newscasters say everything using similar key words. It’s all starting to sound the same. What we need is a redneck newscaster, a Southerner up there just calling things like they are. “Today, the Democratic leaders are MADDER THAN A WET HEN.” “HEAVENS TO BETSY these protestors have lost their minds.” “There’s some trouble on the border OVER YONDER.” See! Isn’t that already more interesting? Through the years, I’ve enjoyed recalling some phrases and words we use down in the South. Those memories come back to me a whole lot clearer than whatever the heck happened last week.
I mentioned the word SLIPSHOD the other day and my grandson stared at me like I had misspoke. “Bless his heart”, he has a medical degree but I have to explain to him what SLIPSHOD means. Most us in our lifetime have played horseshoes. If an animal has shoes on, it is shod. However putting shoes on a horse is difficult. It involves taking the animal to a blacksmith to fit shoes. The blacksmith makes a mold of the horse’s foot , uses a heat source, takes an anvil and hammers the shoe into the size that fits the horse’s hoof. The animal cannot be used on paved roads unless he is shod. The worst thing for a farmer is a crippled animal. The worst thing for a horse is that these shoes are nailed on. I told Ed Hall that his feet are so big and clunky that he would make a terrible horse, so there goes his nickname Mr. Ed. Anyway, the word now means careless or slovenly. What I told my grandson was that he did a SLIPSHOD job of cutting the grass.
We Southerners like to drop the G at the end of the words. It doesn’t save any time, so I’m not sure why we do this, but down on the farm we were always FIXIN TO do things or doing absolutely NOTHIN. I’ve never in my life put a G on the end of saying What are you DOIN. I googled to see if this was a Southern thing, and Google literally said that dropping the G in words is a marker of low education and social class. Well speaking of dropping the G, I’m wondering if I should drop Google. Even more disturbing is this CHAT GBT thing. I wonder what it has been programmed to think about Southerners. You know what Chat GBT can’t do? Wake up at sunrise and milk the cows and mend fences and get work done.
Another farm word that sticks out in my mind is ROOTABEGGAR, or at least that’s how I thought it was spelled. A rootabeggar resembles irish potatoes and sweet potatoes. It has a stalk similar to all vegetables raised in the garden, which is not ground vegetation. To gather rootabeggars, you have to root them out. They are extremely hard to peel and require boiling to make them edible. I assume that the beggar part is getting someone to eat them . My daughter was quick to point out that this is not how the word is said or spelled, and I told her to MIND YER BIZNESS which is a great redneck phrase. You can imagine, this phrase is told to me nearly every day of my life.
There’s another word that is amusing to say and sticks out in my mind. POLLYWOG. There was a very familiar song that we Southerners sang. “I am going down south to see my spouse singing Pollywog Doodle all day”. The same daughter pointed out that it was PollyWollyDoodle and not POLLYWOG and that I had all the lyrics wrong. Seeing that I’m 94, why not just let me have it. I googled (before I dropped it ) what POLLYWOG meant, and it’s a tadpole. So that reminded me of another Southern word: TOADY. People don’t use this word much anymore, but it’s appropriate for nearly everyone in Politics. This would be a good word for these boring newscasters to implement. The definition: a person willing to go to the extremes to flatter. The original term was “toad-eater” from the 1800’s, and it referred to someone who would publicly eat a toad and claim that it was poisonous. That person’s superior would then magically save the toad-eater by pretending to draw out the poison. It was all a trick to make the superior look powerful. It sounds ridiculous that someone would eat a frog just to make the boss happy, but think about Congress and the media. It’s not too far off.
Southerners certainly have a way with words, and if we could get some of the TV stations to do a Southern broadcast, I think the humor alone might make the news go down a little easier. Right now it’s like swallowing a frog. AIN’T that the truth.