My father was born in Bay City, Michigan, and grew up on farms and in Bay City and Detroit. His speech was Midwestern and earthy. When describing something done any-which-way, he’d say, “By main strength and awkwardness,” or sometimes he’d use the whole phrase as he had heard it, “They did it like the bear shit the corn, by main strength and awkwardness.” Some of his colorful speech I believe he made up on the spot, liked, and re-used, such as “If you’re weaned on shit, you’ll swear by it.”

My mother’s parents spoke Yiddish with their friends, but Mom didn’t retain much of it. Still, Yiddish or Yinglish expressions came into her conversation, and when her mother came to live with us when I was in the fifth grade, I also heard them directly. I remember my grandmother saying, “Bin ich den ah garbage can?” when I asked her to finish something I didn’t like to eat. The original, she explained, was what someone had said when spat upon: “Bin ich den ah shpittoon?”  My mother was born and grew up in San Francisco, and though her accent was standard California, she said that she slid into the “South of the Slot” accent of old San Francisco when she was nervous or in Brooklyn where the speech is similar.

My mother studied Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and medieval French on her way to getting a Ph. D. in Romance Philology. She read me Babar books in French when I was little and sang French folk songs to me. Later she delighted me by reading Chaucer and other Middle English verse aloud so I could hear how it sounded.

When I was writing essays for school and asked her about a word, she would say, “Go look it up.” The trouble was, I would find so many interesting words on the way to the one I wanted that I would have a hard time getting the writing done. Looking words up in an internet dictionary eliminates this problem, but I would have missed ‘theorbo’ (a musical instrument) if we’d had the internet when I was in high school. Granted, I haven’t had a use for the word until now, but I’ve had it handy, just in case, for about fifty years.

Malvina was addicted to crossword puzzles and anacrostics. For a long time, I could take them or leave them, but a few years ago, I got addicted too. I quit buying puzzle books when I was eliminating activities to make time to write the biography, but I’m still allowing myself the Sunday NY Times puzzle.

This just in: The same day I wrote all that, I got an invitation to join the crew of Word-A-Day, a mixed bag of word freaks who take an odd word each day and write a limerick using it. I consider this invitation quite an honor. So I clear one thing (puzzles) out of my life and add another. The limerick usually doesn’t take as much time as a puzzle, and I can skip the words I don’t get an immediate idea for. Here is one of the words and my limerick:

Prise (pryz) verb tr

    1. To force open or part something with a lever

    2. To extract information from someone with difficulty

noun

    A lever

        A lady with muscles of size

        Found a knight who did light up her eyes.

            He was stuck in his armor,

            Which made her the warmer,

        She would this handsome sir prise.  

      

© 2007 by Nancy Schimmel