(Published in the May issue of Brazos Monthly magazine)
On a frigid day in the city of Boston I found myself in need of a cup of hot coffee and a warm place to drink it in. I had never been to that city and had only one day to see the sights. Unfortunately, it was freezing and spitting occasional smidges of snow. But I was almost forty years younger than I am now and was determined to walk the famous Freedom Trail which would take me across the big city park they call a common, then to Paul Revere’s house, the Old North Church, two or three historical graveyards (one of which contains Paul Revere’s final abode), the USS Constitution, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s house, and Bunker Hill.
It would be an awfully long walk on a pretty summer day, which this one was definitely not. Thus, the need for that java and warmth. I asked an elderly lady bundled up against the morning where I might find a good cup of coffee. She pointed up the street to a cafe and said “Right thyah, but it’ll cost you a nominal egg.”
It wasn’t until I was sipping the expensive brew that I realized she had not warned me that it would cost very little, which ‘nominal’ can mean, but very much. What she had said, in her thick Bostonian brogue, was ‘an arm and a leg’. What got lost in translation was an old idiom, aka an aphorism, adage or – more commonly – a saying.
I’m fascinated with how people talk to each other. And, being a Texan born and raised, I’m guilty of employing my share of words peculiar to hereabouts, like ‘yall come to see us’ and ‘I’m fixin to get some lunch’.
When I was in high school up in Oakwood I worked after school and on Saturdays in a grocery store where idioms floated around regularly. One lady told me the milk she’d bought the day before was ‘blinky’ (on the verge of going sour), someone else always greeted me with ‘howsyamamanthem?’ (how is your mother and the rest of the family?) and one day a man asked me to put his purchases on his credit account by informing he had to ‘put his wife in the doctor’ (which I hoped meant she had to be hospitalized).
Baseball is brimming with unique phrases and metaphors employed regularly by play-by-play announcers. A ‘beanball’ is a pitch that hits a batter in the head, a ‘cup of coffee’ is the miniscule amount of time a minor league player mightspend in the big leagues before being sent back down again, and a ‘can of corn’ is a fly ball to the outfield that is easy to catch. A ‘Texas leaguer’ is a high fly ball that falls between an outfielder and an infielder that results in a base hit. The famous sports writer of long ago Red Barber popularized an old saying by saying a baseball player or team was ‘in the catbird’s seat,’ a term not used much anymore which meant they were in a desirable situation in a game or at the plate. I finally looked up the origin of that phrase and learned that a catbird is an Australian bird that perches on a limb and mocks, or makes fun of, other birds.
It’s possible to create your own idioms. I’ve seen it done at least twice.
Several years after the Watergate scandle, journalist and author William F. Buckley said thisin an interview: “It seems Richard Nixon is undergoing a … dehobgoblinazation. Mr. Buckley, who was well acquainted with a vast supply of words, discovered, midsentence, that he couldn’t locate one that means ‘being perceived as not as bad or evil as once thought’. So he invented one.
And when I was in a clerk for Uncle Sam I had to log in job orders, which in those pre-computer days were slips of paper. A large empty space was provided where the person submitting the order was to write in detail what was wrong that needed repairing. One staff sergeant, not a great speller, always used just one word to describe what was wrong with the piece of equipment, be it a rifle, a pair of binoculars, a jeep, a tank or a helicopter. ‘BORKEY’ he wrote in six capital letters. Which, we all assumed, meant broken.
A half century later I still use that wonderful word when a thing, an idea, a system or a situation is hopelessly fragmented, wrecked, inept, disappointing or hopeless.
Sometimes things are just borkey.
Ron Rozelle Wordsmith 