I’m running late today, but I am here! The above A&J from five years ago is a good example of something I mention here rather often. Regardless of what one thinks of the joke itself, it’s a good example of the essential comic strip, one where the words and the art are equally important. Take one away, and the other doesn’t work. No less than Charles Schulz said, it is what makes a comic strip a comic strip.
461 responses to “Is there any other kind?”
East Texas people say “warsh” for “wash” and “winder” for “window.” Which I make fun of with great glee. I love to tell one of them, “Georger (Georgia), open the winder.” It makes her so irritated. I admit to saying “ant” for “Aunt” and making no difference between “pin” and “pen.” One East Texanism I will never commit is saying “fixin’ to” for “about to do” and “carryin'” for “taking.” Yankees I know make fun of “reckon” but I have seen it in British books,so there!
Ghost, a quote re your statement about running out of room: “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment…”
Sherlock Holmes, as quoted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Jackie, Jakob-Kreutzfeld disease is the human equivalent of Mad Cow disease. The virus eats its way through the brain and spinal system with terrible results. Mad Cow disease came about through the process of recycling sheep brain and nerve tissue into cattle feed, thereby transferring a disease of sheep into the cattle production system.
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The reason East Texans pronounce words that way is the same reason that they do in Winn Parish, LA where most of half my ancestors came from. It is preservation of the dialect they brought with them from the Piedmont low country of the Carolinas when they immigrated right after the Revolutionary War.
Professors, I am going to admit I took this course back in the early 1960’s and don’t have Ghost’s phenomenal recall but one of my prof’s did his doctoral paper on the subject. My ancestors left Carolinas prior to 1790, via Mississippi and Alabama, got to Louisiana by 1805. They spoke an English much like our forefathers did and continued to speak it because they were “hillbillies” who were locked in by physical and social barriers.
As the years progressed and Texas opened up, they moved into East Texas taking their dialects with them. My Aunt/Ant spoke exactly as Lily describes and yes, I laughed at them some myself.
Of course, I had the advantage of a Yankee education and people who strove to eradicate the Southern accent by teaching me “universal English.” That and how to eat all my meals with a knife and fork, even fried chicken and corn, apples and bananas.
And courtesy and curtsying at the cotillions!
Love, Jackie Monies
Seriously, is this terrible disease carried by squirrels and rodents that people eat? Like squirrel brains are still considered delicacies I know in dumplings/stew. I wasn’t joking about that part.
About unneeded trivia and information, my husband’s favorite thing to tell me is “That went out when I opened the seacock to my brain” or close enough? Meaning, he deliberately no longer cares to know that if he ever did!
Love, Jackie Monies
I love dialects.
In a meeting, our IT department manager distributed to the department managers a memo from our software vendor, detailing the status of some needed fixes. After glancing at it, I pointed out that the memo was a bit confusing about which fixes were accomplished, in the pipeline, or pending. He agreed. I then told him that for the benefit of us Southerners the vendor should consider re-categorizing them as “Fixed”, “Being Fixed” and “Fixin’ To Be Fixed”. That got a good laugh from the (Mid-Western) IT guy, and I even caught our hard-ass division VP fighting off a smile.
Jackie, I’ll admit squirrel brains as a delicacy is one I missed growing up. My mom did sometimes fix brains and eggs for Christmas breakfasts, canned calf’s brains being widely available in food markets. Of course, that was back in the day when if you’d said “bovine spongiform encephalopathy” folks would have looked at you and asked just how hard you’d been hit in the head with that two-by-four.
Oh, and the really cool thing about having eaten brains and eggs…it actually grossed out my Cajun friends when I told them about it. 🙂
I was about 17 when I took that course and found out my phD prof had been out recording my relatives say “Ah wurshed the tare on the kar” and they meant tire/not tar.
He had gone to Carolinas or been in school there, recorded them, then came back to Louisiana and recorded my kin folks, declaring “they were the closest thing to our colonial forefathers still extant in the country.”
At 17 that is embarrassing. At 70 it is fascinating.
Well, my hillbilly kinfolks did manage to put three governors of Louisiana in office and might well have put a president in the White House, so they must have brought some native smarts along for the wagon ride!
Love, Jackie Monies
Another delicacy I would not/did not eat but I recall Granny putting canned tomatoes in hers?
But no one but me ate oysters and seafood although I found a ton of jars for them in that cistern I dug up. A family who built/owned the house after Civil War seemed to have brought in a LOT of expensive and strange comestibles. I doubt they ate squirrel brains? Help might have?
Love, Jackie Monies
Yeah, well, Sherlock Holmes may have prided himself on being a skillful worker who had nothing in his brain-attic but a large assortment of the tools which helped him do his work, but he was still a cokehead and a junky. 🙂
I would kill for one more quart jar of my grandmother’s canned tomatoes. I’ve never had any others that were quite as good.
Jackie: http://www.mad-cow.org/~tom/victim23.html
Don’t forget that Eddie Valiant tried to drown his demons… but that was typical of the private investigators who were sucked into complicated plots and tormented by women who weren’t truly bad, just drawn that way.
My husband would kill for one more quart jar of my granny’s blue lake pole beans, canned. Not so much her tomatoes but possibly the peaches?
Before I had carotid bypass he made me teach him how to get the peaches perfectly ripened and peeled for frozen peaches that never turn brown without using simple syrup and artificial chemicals. It’s not that hard but he wanted to know in case I didn’t make it.
I told him the hard part would be finding a woman that would do it!
I first heard “pop” as a term for a soft drink in Illinois, but in what part of the country do they say “soda pop”?
My daughters tease me about my changeable accent. I tend to slide into the mode of what-ever region I’m in at the time. I have the benefit of education, but I’ve been exposed to a boat-load of regional southern dialect from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas (Not much from LA, Jackie). I can understand ‘most anyone from the “South” and I shameless use “fixin to” and “Y’all” in everyday conversation. I find it interesting, today, that when we read Huck Finn in high school that there was no interpretation needed for the vernacular of Tom, Huck, or Jim. Everyone knew pretty well exactly what they meant.
Kreuzfeld-Jakob is not caused by viruses but by prions. Much nastier little boogers. For one thing, you can’t sterilize them away.
I avoid the whole thing by never eating brains that I know of, and making fun of doofuses that believe in zombies. I ask you!
Ghost, I love Travis McGee still. I say aunt/ant, and I think “soda pop” was perfectly acceptable when I grew up in Kansas (a lot of years ago).
Where I grew up, the only oysters I ever saw came in a can.
We later moved further south, where I first saw shrimp when I was fourteen. Had to ask what they were. I’ve made up for that since, though.
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We also tended to say “crick,” as in “I’ll be there Sunday, God willin’ and the crick don’t rise.” Have we talked about that one here before? Did someone think it referred to the Creek Indian Nation rather than the local waterway?
When I last ran a number of salesmen I covered from California as far north as Bakersfield, NV, up to Utah, then across AZ, NM, TX. OK, LA. MO, MS, AL, TN, FL, GA. Coast to coast in a single day with time changes, I’d start early and end late, late. My job was to route the guys to accounts I set up to buy from them, so I was basically doing ton of cold calling to open new accounts or reopen old closed accounts, get set appointment in existing accounts. This is actually the hard part of selling, once this is done its usually a done deal. I was guaranteeing that the salesmen were actually working, not goofing off.
The interesting thing was the regional accents in a single day. In the South I spoke more Southern accent, out West I went to a more universal or Texan speech pattern, Yankee doesn’t work south of I-40!
Love, Jackie Monies
Munchkin, for some reason I’ve been reading some dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction lately, and I’ll have to say that some writers have come up with explanations for their “zombies” and zombie-like creatures that don’t require a huge suspension of disbelief.
At one point in my life, I spent a good bit of time on the telephone, calling all over the country doing investigative and skip-tracing work. When I made calls to businesses above the M-D Line, the “Yankee girls” sure did seem to like my accent.