One thing that made Saturdays complete when I was a child living on Railroad Avenue was the procession of itinerant comic book exchange boys and girls.
     Two or three kids from the Pecos and Commerce street area, delegates of the 1940s version of the Bookmobile, sans books or wheels, came by regularly, their arms full of comic books for exchange. Because my siblings and I were extremely literate (okay, well, where comic books are concerned), we customarily had a pile of crime, detective, humor, war, adventure and romance comic books.

     In the pre-television era, all of us had our preferences. I venture to say some of our language acquisition was due to comic books. And that may apply to youths all over.
     And we could usually surmise the traders’ preferences, depending on the particular jargon they employed. The verbal exchange, preceding the comic book exchange, went like this:
     “Ja get duh latest Superman?”
     “Sher did.”
     “Glad, cuz Orlando sed he wuz ou-duh-vem (out of them).” The visitor’s simple inquiry was fitting, and proof of how comic books influenced our speech patterns. Comic book dialogue is about the only medium in which people spell the way they speak. Of course, we managed to de-concatenate our dialect on Monday when back in school, lest we get lectured by Sister Excruciata Dolorosa.
     But for the weekend, we found the “ing” endings burdensome and usually employed constructions like “Jeet?” and “Smatter?” What do they mean? The answers appear at the end of this column.
     Now if the visitor had interspersed phrases like “oh goodness!” “oh dear!” and “what on earth” we would have known her preference would have romance comics. And the trader would have to be female. Guaranteed.
     My visitor that day thumbed through some 20 of our copies and let me choose an equal number. The classic comics, the printed equivalent of a double-feature movie, sold for 25 cents and were worth three regular comics.
     Assured I had done my duty, I placed the comics on the sofa. Later, when my older sister Bingy returned from town, she was ready to clean my clock.
     “Whuja do with my comics?” she asked. I said, “Dare rye chair, on duh couch.” Well, it turns out that what we ended up with were “reruns.” Before my personal trader arrived, some other neighborhood kid had already exchanged with Bingy, and I had inadvertently gotten rid of her “in” pile. Bingy never again trusted me to handle that kind of transaction.
     Still, the comic book experience was valuable. I used to wonder why comics writers were the only ones with a grip on how words should be spelled.
     For example, two people quarreling will invariably say, “sez who?” The “approved” orthographic form doesn’t even come close. “Says,” should rhyme with “pace.” Similarly, comics will have, “I wuz,” when the approved form would be “was,” a sight-rhyme of “gas.” Catering to my penchant for finding orthographic irregularities in English words, Beth Abney pointed out that “cough,” “though” and “borough” have entirely different vowel sounds, yet they end with the same four letters. I repeat: How does a foreigner ever learn to pronounce words in English?
     Years of grading student papers have convinced me that maybe they’re trying to tell us something when they choose the more phonetic version of “cause” or “because” and spell it “cuz.” And I don’t wince as much anymore at hearing “gonna,” for “going to” and “c’mon” for “come on.” I need to repeat daily, “Language is what people make of it, not what some 17th century virginal spinster school marm said it should be.” But yet. But yet . . . it’s interesting to observe the course of the spoken language as it affects tight-knit communities.
     Everybody remembers the story of prisoners who had no contact with the outside world and were starved for communication. All the jokes had already been circulated, so it became convenient simply to number the jokes.
     One person brought down the big house when he yelled out, “No. 107,” which represented the oft-heard joke by that number.
     Someone else hollered “22.” No response. “How about 87?” Still nothing.
     Later, he asked a cellmate why nobody had reacted to his jokes. The reply, “Some people know how to tell Å’em, some don’t.” A slight variation of that features the same convicts who break into hysterical laughter when one of the prisoners yells out, “113.” It took a while to settle down the men.
     The teller of the “joke” was amazed and asked why they had laughed so hard. One answered, “Well, we hadn’t heard that one before.” And so it goes with closed communities: people start parroting one another.
     Listen, for example, to radio station guests here and elsewhere who assume correct English gives “a” a long sound, rhyming with “pay,” and “the” rhymes with “he.” Nobody would ever fault one for making it “uh” and “thuh.” And it’s a mistaken notion to equate the long “a” and “e” with less casual talk. Even the word “to” comes closer to “duh” in conservation. We say, “Let’s go duh town,” not “Let’s go too town.” “A” has long sound mainly in grade school, as kids learn their ABCs. About the only other time one hears the long “a” is when someone sez, “I got an A in math.” And we needn’t say, “It’ll make ay difference,” although we hear it daily in local commercials. Uh friend wrote uh letter in such uh way that thuh problematic words like “go” and “do,” which should rhyme but don’t, got rendered “goe” and “dew.” I agree. It makes more sense. But that’s swimming against thuh tide, and it’s uh topic best left for uh future column. And by the way, “Jeet” is a mono-syllabic way of asking, “Did you eat?” And “smatter?” is a time-saving way of asking, “What’s the matter?” And the “matter” was that I traded my sister’s comics without her knowledge or consent.