Steppin' out

Here we are, folks: the last UOPTA post of 2008. For those of you who celebrate Christmas, I hope yesterday's was especially jolly for you. Hopefully everyone has at least a couple of workdays off to enjoy sleeping in a little. My internal clock doesn't really let me do that, but I've heard it's fun. Ok, enough pleasantries. Let's jump right into some random crap and end this year off right.

Aside from his back going out every so often, my dad is usually quite healthy. Therefore it was very strange to have a stomach bug hit him so hard that he didn't join us for dinner on my favorite brother's birthday last week. Two days later, he was back to 95% and sent me this email (at ptklein@gmail.com) in an effort to give me some additional blog fodder: "So, on Saturday when 'I was feeling like shit' (nice mental image), 'was as sick as a dog,' 'felt like I had been run over by a Mack truck,' so chilled that I was 'colder than a witch's tit'.....I started to think about these 'sick' sayings. Anything there for you?" Well, Pops, not exactly, but it did get me (uh oh) thinking about something similar.

Before I dive into that though, please allow me to comment on the selections he made in his email. "Feeling like shit" is interesting to me, because I don't know if it was intended to mean "feeling as bad as shit smells" or "feeling like the consistency of shit." I know, that's quite repulsive, but where else can you get this in depth idiom analysis? "Sick as a dog" puzzles me, because I don't think of dogs as sick at all. I mean sure, they have diseases and illnesses, but I see many more humans far more often with colds, hurt muscles, scrapes and bruises, etc. It could just be that humans live so much longer than dogs that we have many more opportunities to get sick. Or, now that I've given this additional thought, are they using "sick" in the vomiting sense? I will agree that I see or hear of dogs throwing up more often than non-infant humans. Of course, they tend to eat grass a little more often than the average adult human, so that's not too strange. Therefore, if "sick as a dog" really means "vomiting, like a dog does from time to time," then that one could make more sense. That means that in order to use that phrase correctly then, people would need to be nauseous and making good on that nausea, if you know what I mean. "Felt like I had been run over by a Mack truck," I'll assume is simply hyperbole. First off, how many people really know what that feels like and have been around long enough to communicate that sentiment? Also, while Mack trucks are rather large, I would venture to say that getting run over by any truck feels relatively the same. I think "run over" is an interesting choice of simply "hit by." Do they mean "flattened?" Peter Klein: he asks the tough questions. And finally, "colder than a witch's tit" has always struck me as odd. Is there anything in any story or fable that tells us witches must live in cold climates? Certainly Oz seemed to be pleasant weather-wise, making The Wicked Witch of the West's tit(s) roughly the same temperature as non-witch Dorothy's, right? (And Dorothy was very clear in saying that she was not a witch at all.) If there's any reason why one part of a witch's anatomy would have a lower temperature than the rest, I'm all ears. If the phrase were, "colder than an Eskimo's tit" or that of a person in Greenland, I could maybe let that slide. Otherwise, I think it's just an excuse to say "tit." Tee hee.

As someone who cares an awful lot about language and word choice, I'm remarkably haphazard with some of my utterances. For example, I nitpick like a crazy nitpicking person at those phrases listed above, yet I've heard myself say, "It's cold as hell in here." That simply doesn't make any sense. "Hot as hell," surely, but cold? I'm just wrong with that one, unlike "duh" and "no duh" which both making sense. (Or being "up for" something and "down with" it at the same time.) I think this is all a function of trying to have interesting similes to express ourselves and occasionally coming up short in that endeavor.

Ooh, I just remembered a very interesting lesson from a linguistics class I took in the Fall of '98. (Crap, was it really that long ago? Getting old is baffling.) My professor told us a story about these types of phrases in another language: French. I shall paraphrase from memory and probably skip over some key points: While we might say that something didn't "budge/move an inch," this language used "a step" instead. Over time, "a step" was used to emphasize more and more negative statements. "Did you eat anything?" "No, not a step." Nowadays, "ne pas" is used for every negative, and the "ne" has almost disappeared completely in spoken French. There was a French student in the class, and the professor asked him to say a sentence to illustrate his point. Sure enough, there was only the slightest hint of an "n" sound in there, basically leaving "step" to carry the entire negative aspect of the sentence. I was very pleased with that lesson, and I was equally amazed to see many of my fellow students doodling or falling asleep during that same lecture that had fascinated the hell out of me. Hey, French-speakers out there: how would you say, "That is not a step" in reference to the top part of a ladder? I imagine it would fairly redundant sounding but necessary. Enlighten me please. Anyway, I think of that lesson every time I say "faux pas" or (less often) hear "pas de deux." Speaking of which, when does "So You Think You Can Dance" come back on?

Ok, this is unrelated to the major theme of this post but I felt like I should include it here since it's another cool foreign language thing. In Spanish, there's an intriguing lack of a verb. "To drop" does not exist. Instead, "to let fall" is used (dejar caer, for those of you scoring at home). It totally takes the mistake part out of the action. For example, in English, "I dropped the soap, which resulted in a new level of friendship with my cellmate." In Spanish though, "I let the soap fall." That sounds like I wanted it, right? Believe me, I didn't. I suppose one could "accidentally let something fall" to convey the same point, but that then becomes three words to describe the one we have in English. I might try to use that in my everyday life more often. "Oh no, you dropped the vase!" "Nope, I just let it fall." That should work out well. After all, you can't spell "dropped" without Pedro.

Back to that specific type of simile we were discussing a paragraph or two ago: my friend Dave has a very interesting take on this. I don't know what started it, but he began ending sentences with "as/like China" all the frickin' time. "It's as crowded as China in here" might actually make sense, but "That gumball was as sour as China" or "My bike seat's as rusted as China" doesn't. I'd love to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe he was trying to be like the French and eventually have "China" signify a negation, but I know in my heart of hearts that he was just being a weirdo. After all, this is the same guy who decided to call part of the carpet in the room I shared with Greg and Dusty, "The Strait of Gibraltar." I don't think the room resembled the meeting of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, but maybe he did somehow.

If you had an alarm clock set to tell you when it was time for the Car Watch section of this post, it would be beeping its head off right now.

My homey Rockabye sent me a license plate along with his best guess for what it's attempting to say: "WLDDNUT ??? Wild donut?" I wish I had a better guess than that, but I truly believe that "Wild donut" or "doughnut" is fairly accurate. If there were only one D, I'd suggest, "Wild in Utah," but that's not too likely either I suppose. What would make a doughnut wild? Extra sprinkles? Not conforming to the normal round shape? Being made of neither dough nor nuts? I'm confused by this, but also a little hungry. Any other thoughts on what this person is trying to communicate?

My mom saw a plate that pleases me quite a bit: "LO IM VE." It took me a second, but it's quite clearly one of those word puzzles. In this case, it's "I'm in love." What I like so much about this is how few of these puzzles can fit in the constraining space of a license plate. Seven characters, all in the same row. That last point is crucial, since many of those puzzles rely on being "over" or "under" to get their message across. You know, like "Stand/I" is "I understand," etc. Therefore, this driver makes an excellent use of limited space. Bravo, sir or madam; a tip of the imaginary cap to you.

Lastly, I saw a plate that made me yell at the car's driver. "ILV2W84," it said. I checked the plate frame, but there were no other words to help me out. "What are you waiting for?" I asked loudly. If the driver had heard me, he may have thought that there was a green light or something, but I was solely interested in the license plate. I don't care if they "love" or "live" to wait for something - I just want to know what that something is. Being a hyperpunctual person, I wait a lot for a lot of different things. It's not fun. It sucks, to be frank. Maybe it's never been explicitly made a rule, but I'd like to add, "License plate messages must be complete thoughts" to the DMV books somewhere. If I ever met that driver in person, I'd have a good mind to.

And now we've reached the final paragraph. Let's get some happies out there for today through next Thursday. Today, my friends, is the always-festive Boxing Day and my good friend Silver's half-birthday. Tomorrow is your humble blogger's half-birthday. Sunday is my dad's birthday, and it hopefully won't be a step colder than Glinda's tit in China on that day. Dad, I hope you're as happy as a clam on that day (because that makes oh so much sense). Monday is little Sacky Katy's half-birthday. Wednesday is New Year's Eve, and Thursday brings us to 2009. I welcome '09 and all of its '09ness. In fact, March of next year will be 3/09, which is probably the month/year combination that sounds closest to my name. It's almost close enough that you could probably say, "Hey, three-oh-nine" and get me to look up. Ok, maybe not that close, but still. Happy holidays, my homepeople. Have a safe and fun New Year's Eve, and I hope '09 is healthy and prosperous for you all.