The Wide World of Words By Linda Stowe
~~~
One of the blessings of being raised with grandparents in my life is that I was exposed to a wider vocabulary and, with that, an awareness of an earlier way of life.
When I was a child going to school, catching the school bus was a big deal because my brother and I had to run out to the end of a long lane. We had it timed so that when the bus was stopped at the Parks’ house to pick up their kids, we had time to make it to the end of our lane by the time the bus arrived. Sometimes my grandfather was at our house, and he would keep watch for the bus to let us know when to head out the door. When he saw the bus stop at the Parks’ house, Grandpa would say, “Here comes the hack!” and we would grab our stuff and go. It was only years later that I learned why Grandpa called the school bus a hack. In his youth, some kids went to school in a horse-drawn carriage (hackney carriage). The carriages used to carry children to school were called kid hacks.
When my grandparents installed a fishing lake on part of the farm, they moved the old brooder house (where baby chickens are raised) over to the lake and repurposed it into a building from which they checked in fishermen and sold snacks. At that point, the brooder house became referred to as “the shack,” which sounded more inviting to customers than chicken coop.
I don’t know if it was because of my grandparents’ age or their culture, but they routinely used many colorful phrases. “Well, I’ll swan.” “It’s just the shank of the evening.”
As I think about how language changes, I can see how that might happen. The word for a known thing is repurposed for an updated usage (the coop becomes the shack). A word might visually describe something. (The shank, or top of the leg, describes the beginning of the evening.) A word comes from the old country (“swan” is a term for “swear” used in Northern England and, later, Appalachia).
If you think about it, language is a collection of repurposed hand-me-down words that share history and meaning with their predecessors just as I share my language and history with my grandparents.
~~~~~~~
Polly here.
As I read the last part about language changing and words getting repurposed, I thought about the slang of today’s generations. A few years ago, “phat” (fat) and “sick” were used to mean “great” or “awesome.” And now, “cap” means you are lying, and “drip” means clothing.
I’m not sure I get their connections to common English words.
But there are a lot of things I don’t get these days.
But “Mares eat oats?” Heck yeah. “Does eat oats,” too.
The Wide World of Words By Linda Stowe
