Old Proverbs, New Applications

                                               Old Proverbs, New Applications

                                                           by Marco M. Pardi

                                         As always, your comments are welcome

 “A proverb is a short sentence based on a long experience.” Cervantes (1547-1616)

Far ago and long away, on a stark and dormy night, an Eastern European colleague and I settled into a cabin to await a scheduled SW burst.  With a few hours to go, we eventually settled on exchanging cultural proverbs to identify similarities.  I started with: A stitch in time saves nine; A penny saved is a penny earned; Don’t count your chickens before they hatch; and, Happy as a dead hog in sunshine (having heard that recently in the American southwest, I just threw that in there).

“How can a dead hog be happy,” she asked.  “I don’t know. I just thought it was oddly picturesque,” I said. She rejoined with: Друг познаётся в беде́ – A friend in need is a friend indeed; Была́ не была́ – Whatever happens, happens; Лу́чше по́здно, чем никогда́. – Better late than never; and, В тихом омуте черти водятся. – Still waters run deep.  Finally, looking at me she said, Будет и на нашей улице праздник! – Every dog has his day (It can also mean The sun will shine on our street too).

Apparently there are shared concepts.  But she was more curious about dialect.  In her travels she had seen American Western films, “Cowboy pictures”, and wondered if people really spoke that way.  The first item I cleared up was “cowboy”, a term which had nothing to do with Clint Eastwood or John Wayne.  Fairly well off urbanites from the early American cities moved into newly purchased or stolen territories intending to get away from developing urban blight and crime.  They acquired land and cattle, but had no idea how to manage the cattle and no intention of being out there with them day after day.  But the vast labor pool provided by slavery offered many young boys and men from African cultures with hundreds, if not thousands of cumulative culture years of cattle herding experience.  In those cultures, young boys were assigned cattle duties, growing to manhood and eventual ownership of their own herds.  It was these boys and young men, acquired on the slave market, who became the “cow boys” of the South and West.  They never acquired the money for their own horses, much less six guns and fancy hats;  that began to develop among the Anglos who filled the ranks once slavery was abolished.  But, the term “cowboy” stuck.  And the term “boy”, applied even to older Black men by younger Whites, lived well into the 20th Century. 

But about that “dialect”, especially that Texan “drawl”, perpetuated to this day as a badge of honor.  A dialect is a call sign, a call sign of solidarity.  In a greatly expanding and more mobile human population simple appearance will no longer suffice to signal solidarity; the “If you look like me you must be like me” rule no longer applies.  The “If you sound like me you must be like me” – from the same region, socio-economic class, educational background has come to the forefront.  It is a comfort, a sign you can relax among your fellows.  In fact, I’ve heard people return from home leave using dialectical speech they had not left with; the transition away from that long term comfort takes time. In the same way, I’ve heard “code switching” from on-duty to off-duty to such an extreme it was hard to accept it was the same person.  Of course, some cannot free themselves easily from the solidarity in which they were raised.  I’ve known several African-American service members who confided their caution on home leave lest they “slip up and get dissed for becoming an Oreo – Black on the outside and White on the inside.”

But it was in the context of addressing the “Texan accent” that suddenly Aesop’s fable of the sour grapes made sense.  Within every country in the Northern Hemisphere, with few exceptions, the southern areas of the country are the agricultural areas, commonly peopled by individuals with far less geographic mobility, awareness of the broader world, and educational development than the rest of the country.  The more slowly evolving dialect in these areas is a distinct marker. It may be exaggerated by some, as in parts of the American “Deep South” for commercial exploitation but it nevertheless stands as a badge symbolizing a perceived (in-group) shared history, educational level, and world view.  Of course, there are also those who quickly attempt to adopt the indicators of membership within the in-groups. During two assignments to Texas I often commented that the people with the biggest hats, belt buckles, pick-up trucks and the fanciest boots just moved there from Michigan. That’s the nice side.

The not so nice side is the intrinsic rejection of the advances, education, and values of the larger society. Just as Aesop’s fox gave up on the grapes, saying they were sour after all, the implicit message in the broadcasting of the “Texan dialect” is that “book learnin'” is inferior to that which is learned on the imaginary Wild West range. I’ve been fascinated by people who were born, raised and educated in the suburbs of mega-cities like Houston and Dallas trying to sound as if they just rode in from a cattle drive. The only cows they ever saw were on milk cartons. But, they did see many Hollywood produced Westerns.  I know people with Ph.Ds, Pharm Ds, and MDs whose speech marks them as flunk-outs from the fourth grade. They are demonstrably smart, but perhaps not so intelligent.  It is well known that George W. Bush, the only member of his family to speak this way, got through college only because he was a “legacy scholar” and as the son of a very powerful political figure had academic insulation from the failure that would have justly marked his intellectual prowess.  I see his adoption of the markers of semi-literacy as his recognition of being well below the level appropriate to the colleges where he was admitted – and passed along, and therefore a “sour grapes” rejection of the validity which was beyond his reach.  He knew he was a fraud so, through his speech and manner, he heaped scorn on that to which he could not aspire. 

This is not to say those aforementioned MDs et al drifted through schools undeservedly.  It is to say that despite the fact they excelled in their fields and became successful in the terms of the larger society the sub-cultural values of rejecting the larger culture are so deeply embedded they apparently are entirely unable to see the contradiction between their universally accepted success and their radically foreshortened, parochial  persona.  Fascinating. Somehow, the 20th Century Hollywood construct of the Texan has become the new Noble Savage: untainted by education, but wise beyond those of us too foolish to avoid the siren song of academia.

An interesting example of the self defeating rejection of larger values can be found in the Lincoln automotive ads featuring a well dressed Matthew McConaughey, an actor from Uvalde, Texas.  Each of the ads features him talking to himself while driving a Lincoln. One in particular has him initiating his pitch with, “It ain’t about hugging trees…..”.  Yes, Matthew, clearly it’s not about hugging trees.  It’s apparently about repeating a derogatory meme intended to belittle and scorn people concerned for the environment.  He married in 2012.  Given the reality of climate change, I wonder what plans he has for his children and grandchildren while so many others die.  Perhaps they can all gather in a dialectically pure enclave as they discover that, for example, secession from the United States – quite popular in Texas and something I wish they would do so their perverted demands for revisionist school text books would no longer taint classrooms elsewhere – is “cutting of one’s nose to spite one’s face”, as the old saying goes.

One of the great linguistic phenomena of the past few decades is the emergence of cable news networks.  Individuals I’ve known in that industry tell me new employees often go through speech classes to achieve “language leveling”, the elimination of regional accent and even dialect.  While this makes the presentation largely more acceptable and understandable particularly in foreign markets, it has the interesting effect of arousing distrust among those holding refuge in exclusive dialects.  A minor example of the local media effort to acquire and hold trust among viewers is the dumbing down of speech through colloquial usage. Thus, “The cops busted down the door” is now so common I doubt any English teachers still react.  But a person such as myself, who worked hard to acquire English and then American, wonders at the direction of speech when hearing this, and hearing someone say “I’m good” in response to a question of their state of being.  

In moving from the North to the South of the U.S. I encountered people who said “ink pen”.  When I asked why they specified ink, they said it was to distinguish it from straight pin.  These were “educated” people, unaware of the difference between pen and pin.  Many also could not distinguish between aught and ought.  Thus, I began to attribute the survival of dialects to the diminishing readership of the printed word.  Conversely, I’ve known some regionally isolated people whose pronunciation of certain words indicates they have read them but have never heard them spoken; respite comes to mind.

So, I finished my explanation of dialect with the explanation that my speech pattern is characterized as Mid-Western American English, accent neutral.  Of course, I still get the “Ain’t from around here, are ya’?”