Word Nerd 3
The Things They Say
What’s so crazy about batshit anyway? Is batshit crazier than other shit?
Spending almost a year laid up and taking far too many painkillers, my drug-addled mind has wandered strange, dark, convoluted alleys. In one of them, I tripped and fell into a pile of expressions people use and discovered I really don’t understand them. I suppose there’s probably a website where the internet proficient can look up the origins and meanings of these kinds of things, but I’ve been having too much fun wondering and extrapolating. My imagination runs wild with the mysteries and what I think I can discover about someone’s history by the odd expressions they use.
Some of them I get. When we’d leave lights on or stare into the refrigerator, Grandma would ask “You got stock in the company, or what?” And my father would say “I could eat the north end out of a southbound mule,” or “my stomach thinks my throat’s been cut” when he was hungry. His version of “walk it off, you sissy,” was, “It’ll feel better as soon as it quits hurting.” These made sense to me, but when he was tired he’d say “I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put away wet.” A reference to tack, maybe? And Mom, when she was whooped, would say “I feel like I’ve been drug through a knothole backwards.” This was a disturbing image for a kid with a vivid imagination.
Why are talks from Dutch uncles more convincing than, say, a talk from an Irish uncle? Or a Native American one?
Even my beekeeping professor, who has kept bees his whole life doesn’t know the origin and significance of “the bee’s knees” as something positive. Strictly speaking, bees don’t have knees, not in the way we do anyway.
As for having a “wild hair up your butt,” how do we know this is what causes aberrant or entertaining behavior? Did someone look? And how did it get there? Ew.
Then there are the insects. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse than having a wild hair up your butt, someone will say a person must have a bug up their butt. Ick. Or that someone wants to put a bug in my ear. Are we talking earwigs here? No thank you.
As we basked in the gushing joy her puppy lives, my friend turned to me with a smile in her heart for her happy little friend and said “she runs around like a fart in a mitt.”
Me: “Jeeze, it’s our only day off this week. You want to go down to Alamosa and take in a movie or something?”
My friend and coworker: “May as well. Can’t dance. Too drunk to roller skate.”
Mom had an especially colorful repertoire for cussing the kids because beyond damn and hell cussing was not allowed in our home. “For cryin’ in a bucket,” she’d say. I guessed that my unacceptable behavior caused her so much grief her tears could fill a bucket. And, much like when Mom yelled at you using your first, middle, and last names, if she said “For cryin’ in a damn bucket,” it was time to run for your life. Another pissed off mom-ism was “Christ on a crutch.” So, my rulebreaking was so awful it injured the Savior? The only human to ever survive death? And a gruesome violent death at that? Wow. Who knew I had so much power?
Mama Vitt, who had 14 or so kids pestering her for things they wished they had, would eventually snap and say “Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one gets filled first.”
Another Mom-ism from my own mom was to say that either she or someone else was as “mad as a wet hen.” I’ve lived with hens for a couple of decades now and they don’t really seem to get mad. They get crabby when they’re molting (and fair enough, it’s a brutal hormonal process), but they don’t mind being wet in the least. They preferentially go out in the rain. They don’t like going out in the snow and will stand at the head of the ramp when I open their coop on a snowy morning, assess the situation, and retreat to the warm dry hay inside. They settle in with an imperial air of ‘you may serve me in here,’ but they’re not angry.
We hear many old sayings.
Many people have told me I’m crazy. I guess I must be batshit crazy because I look forward to the day the bats return to my front porch for the mosquito harvest every summer. I can tell they’re back by the oh-so-welcome batshit.
Other Resources
| author | Terryl Warnock |
| WRDNRD | The original Word Nerd |
| Word Nerd II | Elusive Fluency |
| Word Nerd III | The Things They Say |
Do your family and friends use entertaining and unfathomable sayings? We would love to hear from you if you would like to share them with us at https://mastodon.sdf.org/@wordsbyterryl or moonlitpress@proton.me
Almost everyone I know who writes occasionally wonders why we do it. It is such a fraught process for me I ask myself this question constantly. And then, some WRDNRD curiosity grabs me by the throat and I can’t not write about it.
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| Graphic design by AJ Brown | https://mastodon.sdf.org/@mral |
Some images are through Creative Commons License and we would thank all of those creators if we could find their names.
Terryl is grateful to all her teachers great and small. Many of these interesting sayings came from listening to the conversations of her elders. Where the elders got them, she’ll never know, but she does find them entertaining and educational.
Terryl is also grateful for all the daily blessings that never seem to make the list here. Beautiful sunsets. Sparkling conversation with interesting people. Life in the company of trees. The yearly return of her bat friends. The beautiful house and setting she is so blessed to live within. Rain. Birds. Horny Toads. Boatmen. Bees. Friends. The list is endless.
Terryl is always grateful to the Life in Pieces writing circle, who read an early draft of this, and of course, to AL, without whom nobody but me would ever read this stuff.
AL and Terryl are both very grateful to the people who read our work. You are what makes it worthwhile.
Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.
Terryl is the author of:The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 : 978-0-9894698-5-2
AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.
A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.
Together, we are MoonLit Press where words and images matter.