...fixing meat loaf, but then didn't everyone's mother?

Once I got out into the wider world I found that the answer is an emphatic NO! Then, after nay parents moved from Oregon to Southern California to retire and I could see them frequently again after over twenty years of separation except for annual visits, I heard nay mother's speech as if for the first time, as though she were from a foreign country, as indeed she was--Canada. As a child I tried to straighten her out that those knitted caps were "stocking caps," not "touques" (French and pronounced /tooks/). She stuck to the Canadian name.

Actually the Canadian part of her linguistic color was pretty insignificant, except for a little ethnic taunt: "Pea soup and jelly cake give the French a bellyache." As you might imagine, my mother was not French. She was German.

But most of her colorful expressions--"a scandal to the hootie owls," "naked as a jaybird," "mad as hops" (hopping mad?), or (when someone is just about done for) being "just one jump ahead of the coyotes"--could be attributed to her western country life, as could the expression, "You've got to get the cow to get the calf," which I recall her using when a boy who came calling on me was especially nice to her.

Her language was always redolent of simple, direct physical experience and short on rarefied abstractions, which are frequently the legacy of a more formal, bookish education. Mom--Catherine Mary Rink Johnson, or Katie, as she was frequently called--graduated from grammar school at thirteen and went directly to work in a soda fountain. There wasn't money for foolishness like high school for a girl in her large (seven children) family in 1921.

Higher education or not, I think my mother's main interest in words was not as ornaments but as simple, utilitarian implements. She couldn't have agreed more with that saint of literary style, E. B. White, who bluntly advises, in Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style, "Avoid fancy words."

Though I can trace tidbits of linguistic color in her speech to certain regions and time frames in which she lived ("the cat's pajamas," "the cat's whiskers"), most of her unique style seems just her own. Though her first language had been German, I don't recall her using many German words in her speech, once more intuitively adhering to White's dictum to "Avoid foreign languages."

To Mom the family was a "tribe." ("The whole tribe is...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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