Questions For The Agesc
The Source
As my Lincoln Land students spent a delightful month interviewing the residents of Knollwood Retirement Village the kids would climb onto the bus each day with questions. What’s a cream separator? You ever heard of gas stamps? Did I get that right.. “The Monkey Ward catalog?” I’d try to answer their queries, stretching my own pitiful knowledge as far as it would go, but sometimes even I….a guy who’d grown up in Central Illinois, was stumped. One lady told us that her folks were so poor during the Depression that “ .. . we couldn’t afford a penny pistol.” Penny pistol? I mean, we knew what she was getting at, but that phrase was totally new to me. “She’d jump like spit on a skillet!” I’d not heard that one before, but I like idioms that get the point across so swiftly and with a little bit of kick. Knollwood is not exactly a nunnery and sometimes we’d have to clean things up a little before putting them in our upcoming show. “It rained like a tall cow (tinkling) on a flat rock.” That one just splatters with humor. I like it. “My Dad came home that night slappin’ at the wallpaper and drippin’ glue.” This meant that the lady’s father was drunk, but we still couldn’t figure out the reason for the sticky wallpaper metaphor. This of course would have been an excellent time for a more astute teacher to turn this into a teachable moment, stopping to examine the use and variety of idiom in the English language. I didn’t. We were having too much fun to call it school. I was a bit puzzled that some words and phrases have apparently melted out of language…at least out of the vocabulary of teenagers. When asked if the residents of Knollwood got along with each other one lady responded. “We don’t squabble. My squabbling days are over.” Only one student of the eighteen was familiar with the concept of squabbling. That’s especially strange since it’s still a pastime much engaged in by the average teen. “Bottle fishing during the Depression.” The young man who is to deliver the line thought that somehow the fisherman would somehow bottle their fish after he brought them home. Another Depression-era custom was new to the students as well as me. One lady said that her mother was a seamstress and she’d make money for her family by copying dresses that women would bring home “on approval.” Apparently this was a common custom when times were hard. You’d bring a dress home from the store, have the seamstress make you a copy, then take it back the next day. Soda crackers in milk for dessert… mixing ketchup and water to make tomato soup… using the innards of chickens for sausage…all lost on my young crew but very much a part of the Knollwood memories. One fellow said his dad threatened to “. . . kick your butt so high you’ll have to unzip your pants to stick our your tongue.” I think we’ve lost a great deal in American speech when we lose pithy phrases like that. And of course some things can simply get garbled in the translation. My grandmother would always say, “I have a nightie.” Huh? “It’s supposed to rain today but I have a nightie that it won’t.” Years after her funeral I figured out that Grandma was simply slurring “I have an idea.” I used to think that Iva Notion was somebody who lived down the road. Grandma would always say “Iva Notion she’ll be here.” And then my young charges found a few phrases that I simply could not explain at all. “Crazy as a pear-orchard boar,” “not a cat in hell’s chance,” “a tough dog to keep on the porch,” and “slick as owl grease.” I tried to explain that at least to my knowledge pigs weren’t necessary driven insane by the smell of fruit, cats are not more prone to damnation to other animals, and that owls have never been known to require lube jobs. These things just pop up. Driving home the students began to bemoan the fact that we no longer use idioms as a part of our every day speech. One girl responded, “Bummer.” Another, “Yeah. LOL.”