July 23, 2005
"You can’t tell from the looks of a toad how high he’ll jump” is one of those delightful sayings our grandparents used for nearly every daily occurrence or special event in life.
Today, however, these pithy phrases are merely rich linguistic customs that most of us have forgotten, if we ever knew about them at all.
Such colloquialisms probably originated in the South and Midwest and spread across the country as settlers followed the great rivers of America westward.
One could “bet the farm” that not a single phrase originated in California!
That’s what my friend Tom enjoyed saying anyway.
Tom Ladwig, my “dearly departed” friend and colleague, loved these regional expressions so much that he began collecting them. Let me tell you, Tom would have preferred being called the “dearly departed” to “the late” Tom Ladwig, any day.
In 1980, I started publishing a small weekly paper in Boonville, much like The Examiner’s Town and Country Extra. I asked Tom, a journalism professor and friend, to write a column on the life and culture of the folks in central Missouri.
It didn’t take Tom long to acquire quite a collection of colorful old expressions that once livened our grandparents’ language.
Tom’s first column on this subject was entitled “I don’t know sic-em.” He asked readers to respond with similar sayings he knew their grandparents probably used every day. He “wagered” they had a stock of them.
His next column was entitled “Grandad talked as smooth as a school marm’s leg.”
“As quick as a duck on a June bug,” his collection was off and running.
Jim Fisher, columnist for The Kansas City Times, took notice and began asking his readers to collect these colorful sayings for Tom. Mark Shepherd of The Columbia Tribune joined in the fun as well.
Before long, Tom had an amazing collection of sayings that were subsequently published in two different books by Rose Publishing Company of Little Rock, Arkansas.
The first, “How to talk dirty like Grandad” was published in 1988. The second, “Granny had a word for it,” was published the following year. I believe these books are out of print now, but it’s worth a search, nonetheless.
Politicians and speechwriters could take a lesson from Tom and his sayings.
He once wrote, “It would be delightful, downright refreshing, if a President would say something like: ‘Sometimes I don’t think the Secretary of the Treasury knows doodley-squat* about money...’ Somehow, this sort of candor gives me confidence. And, it would be a boon to all if speechwriters would take these expressions to heart.”
(*If you don’t know “doodley-squat” you don’t know anything. Northerners and Westerners tend to say “diddley-squat,” according to Tom, but it means the same thing.)
Here are some of my personal favorites from Tom Ladwig’s collection:
When we hear these sayings, they brighten our day and make us smile. We can be transported instantly to some magical place in our minds, and we actually use our brains and begin to picture what the words say.
Alas, we don’t hear these colorful words and phrases much anymore.
I suppose it is not “cool” enough for us.
What we do instead is that we rely on speech that is “canned,” straight from the TV.
Tom thought that television “may be sapping us of this graphic, descriptive means of creating mind-pictures with words.” He wrote, “Our children have little opportunity to develop this ability—they get their images from a screen, readymade and storebought.”
Since this “isn’t the whole piece of cloth” (not the entire story), I’ll write more about our rich heritage of speech another day.
In the meantime, “you all shoo fly” now. (Better get about your business because we all have things to do.).
