Did Lawrence lust after Martha? He must have, since he as much as admitted it to his friend Roger. Or was Roger interested only in clear communication?
I’m referring to the closing graphs of a recent column, in which Lawrence and Roger met in a nightclub and Roger asked Lawrence, “What do you think of Martha and I as a potential twosome?”
And Lawrence replied, “Martha and me would be more like it.”
Lawrence was responding only to the grammatical aspects of Roger’s question: Roger should have used “me” instead of “I,” in the same way that one wouldn’t ever say, “What do you think of I?” It’s a question of compound pronouns, not love-interests.
Whenever we use a pronoun with another element, usually a name, it’s easy to forget grammatical agreement. That’s why we hear people say, “They gave the prize to she and I.” “She and I”? It would have to be “her and me.” Separate the elements if you don’t believe it yet.
The Martha passage is totally about grammar, using “I” and “me,” “very unique” and “feel badly.” In each case, Lawrence reacted to his friend’s expressions, and he didn’t care a whit about Martha. So why does Lawrence ask his friend if Martha might be a little pregnant? Well one can’t be a little pregnant; she’s gotta be either pregnant or not.
And that was just a reaction to Roger’s having said, “very unique couple.”
“Unique” suffices; no need for any kind of modifier.
Well, the minute Work of Art was posted on the Optic’s web site, I got a call from my sister Dolores, in San Francisco, asking me to walk her through it. “Frankly, I didn’t get it,” she said.
As soon as Lawrence said, “Martha and me would be more like it,” the entire passage implied Lawrence thought he’d be a better partner for Martha. Thus, because Dolores missed the very first attempt at correct grammar, the rest of the passage failed to make sense. And once I explained the grammatical aspects of the conversation, Dolores caught on. Having stumped her almost makes up for the times in our youth when she owned the only bike in the family and charged Park Place-type rentals to us have-nots.
I wonder how many other readers got the impression there was a love affair in peril. I’d feel badly — er — bad, if Roger and Martha were to break up over this.
• • •
I left Wal-Mart levitating Thursday over a matter that had never come to mind for a third of a century ago.
Let me explain:
In 1973, we were headed down the Camp Luna hill toward town. We drove a Gremlin with a hatchback window, and our toddler, Diego in a buggy in the tire well. We stopped at the bottom of the hill, but the car behind us didn’t, causing a crash that propelled our second-born to the front seat.
A frightened teenaged girl with no insurance promised to pay for the damages to our car. As we were leaving the next week for Missouri, we needed for the repairs to get done fast. We paid our deductible, an obscene amount of $100, and had our own insurance company foot the bill.
Decades passed, and we forgot about the accident. But Thursday I made eye-contact with the same person, now a mature woman, who reminded me that I was the person she ran into, 33 years ago. “I’ve felt bad for years. I didn’t have insurance, and I’ll feel better if you let me give you a check,” she said.
She wrote a check for $100. I told her the matter had long ago been set aside and (almost) forgotten, but she insisted. “I’ll feel better.”
Not one to deprive her of feeling good, I accepted and also gave her a big hug, told her how proud I was of her and about how she’d made my day. That experience restored a lot of faith in humanity. I wish I could mention her name here, but she knows who she is.
Now, if only I could get others to settle their long-forgotten trespasses.
There was a guy I couldn’t catch on foot because he was on my newly swiped 10-speed bike (this was my bike, not my sister’s); and once, when I was parked behind the old SUB at Highlands, someone — possibly a newly recruited gang member — put a knife into the sidewall of my car; and someone damaged 16 feet of our fence by backing into it.
Y’all come forward. Hear?
• • •
Although I’m in my 60s, I’ve known a 15-year-old for about 50 years. Is this a permutation of modern math, some kind of algebraic puzzler? Actually, my friend and ex-colleague, Dorothy Simpson, is one of the rare people to have been born on Feb. 29, and thus has had only 15 birthdays.
Dorothy reacted to a recent Work of Art that referred to terms like “catywampus” and “all stove up,” as expressions that I thought were strange.
In an email, Dorothy wrote that her late father, Clyde, used regionalisms that one doesn’t commonly hear: “Does anyone ever hear the word ‘hodag?’ What’s a ‘hodag’?”
“I looked it up and discovered it is a mythical creature from the north woods of Wisconsin. That isn’t how my mother [Audrey] used the word. She used it to mean an unkempt waif or ragamuffin. For example, if we wanted to go downtown, she would say, ‘You can’t go out in public looking like that!
You look like a little hodag! Wash your hands and face! Comb your hair! And put on clean clothes!’”
And Dorothy also mentioned “gee-hue,” about which she wrote, “My mother used some unusual words which she undoubtedly learned from her parents.
“[Mom] would always say when it was bitter cold outside, ‘It’s colder than “gee-hue!”’”
I have less trouble with “gee-hue” than with “hodag.” “Gee-hue,” I suspect, is a variation of “Jesus!” in the vein of “gee-zoo,” “geez” and “gee.”
Aren’t most such expressions people’s ways of uttering a shocker without really appearing profane or obscene? When Walter Brennan of “The Real McCoys” would holler “gol-durn it,” wasn’t he really merely euphemizing a term we don’t use in polite company? He was, dang it!
Interesting how people try to skirt profanity and obscenity by uttering sound-alikes. “Christ” has become “cripes,” and “hell” is now “heck.”
Does that mean that one who uses too many swear words is going to burn for eternity in heck?