One thing that was common, though unpleasant, in elementary school was being thought of as a wise-guy. But for a while, I had that reputation at Immaculate Conception School when Sister Aggravnia prepped us second-graders on words and their opposites.
When it was my turn, and the nun asked for the opposite of “light,” I answered “heavy,” only to be razzed by my classmates for not having said “dark.” But why wasn’t my answer just as germane as the others?
Why? Because we’d gone over the list the day before, and “dark” was the lexicological flavor of the week.
That dressing down must’ve taught me to be very cautious in what I label as an opposite.
In an issue of Reader’s Digest, I came across an item in which a company near Cape Hatteras, off the Carolina coast, needed someone to manage a lighthouse, presumably to check for incoming seacraft. A woman answered the ad, boasting, “I’ve been doing light housekeeping for years.”
Well, it’s not that kind of “light” or “house” or “keeping.”
Judee Williams, who first turned me on to the practice of “up-talk,” in which adolescents, usually, end their sentences with question marks, ran across a variation of the Reader’s Digest item, and this one appeared in our very own Optic.
A nursing home in town has been advertising in the want ads for a heavy housekeeper.
Now we can have fun with that.
Judee, svelte, at about 110 pounds, would never qualify. I, at twice her weight, might stand a chance.
We all realize that the chore of housekeeping, not the specs and dimensions of the applicant, is heavy. But what about the other possibilities with “light”?
Let me count the ways:
Judee, who’s fair-skinned and blonde, could qualify as a light house-keeper in both senses of the term. In addition, anyone who’s been through a number of divorces and manages to clean out all his or her exes could qualify as a good house-keeper, whether heavy, light or dark.
Someone who superintends a house made of balsa wood would also qualify as a light house keeper.
And if someone like Judee took a routine cleaning job in one of those flashing, obelisks by the shore, she’d be a light light light lighthouse keeper.
And on that note, let’s move to the mail bag.
Phillip Gonzales, a former Highlands professor who now lives in Tennessee, wrote that he well remembers Rimberts’ taxi in Las Vegas, as mentioned in a recent Work of Art on cabbies. He also mentioned that he used to sell newspapers at the old bus depot, located with several other businesses on what is now the Safeway parking lot. He recalls the Mora stage, a van, that would load up its passengers at about 3:30 with the call, “All abroad (not to be confused with ‘aboard’).” And we never realized an ocean separated Mora and the Meadow City.
Gonzales said that where he lives, in Johnson City, Tenn., he is closer to Ontario than to Memphis and that his town is closer to five state capitals than to its own, Nashville. That is an interesting bit of trivia. Tennessee, thought to be extremely southern, would seem to be 12 days away from any part of Canada, but Phil is right. Ontario is a wee bit closer to his home than is Memphis.
Klare Schmidt commented on a column in which I cited the use of several words to describe a couch. I must have omitted one term. Klare mentioned that when her husband Helmut taught at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, a sofa was called a Chesterfield.
“Later, when we moved to Seattle, I was told that a Chesterfield was actually a cigarette and one couldn’t sit on it,” she wrote. A Chesterfield is both, but it’s a bad idea to fall asleep on one while smoking the other.
And, keeping with the theme that the English language is indeed strange, Klare tells of having lived in Mora and being “startled when a neighbor told me that he had to ‘carry’ his wife to the doctor.”
Klare adds that the wife out-weighed her husband by 50 pounds.
Old folk songs such as “Carry me back to old Virginny,” use “carry” for “take,” without implying hoisting. We assume there’s no real heavy lifting involved, lest we need to call in the nursing home’s new heavy housekeeper for added muscle.
A recent column discussed the confusion in trying to assemble a Razor scooter by following instructions translated from some Eastern language. I admitted then being stumped by some of the terms the instructions included, such as “lapidarian” and “complanate.”
Going through what she calls “The Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate,” Phyllis Ludi found a word I couldn’t: “abecedarian.” The word juxtaposes the first five letters of the alphabet and thus refers to someone teaching or learning the alphabet. It also means “beginner.”
Forty years (less one month) of marriage does not guarantee spouses speak the same language. The other day, my father-in-law, in describing someone who had been experiencing rough times, used the expression “all stove up.” Of course, my wife Bonnie said she knew exactly what her father meant. When I failed to catch the intent of the expression, both regarded me with arms akimbo. “Of course you know what ‘all stove up’ means.”
I’d never heard the term. I swear. And is it fair, just because I’m the husband, for my spouse to conjure up terms and act as if they’d been part of the language forever?
Whenever I come across a new (to me) term, invariably I hear it again, which means either the word suddenly became popular, or else I hadn’t been paying attention.
A few days later an old colleague, Vince, came to visit and (I’m not making this up) he complained about being “all stove up because of my aches and pains.”
Well, that was just too much. Had he been colluding with my wife and father-in-law? I suspect it’s a term I simply hadn’t known existed. Vince explained when and how to use the expression: “Imagine the farmer’s wife who cut off the tails of the three myopic rodents. Well, she only managed to sunder their hind protuberances because she was all stove up with arthritis.”
I concede that language is what people say it is. But how “stove” comes anywhere close to describing a desperate or painful condition, I don’t know.
Surely there’s a wordsmith out there who will fill in the blanks.