On my drive home this evening I was listening to my favorite afternoon Sirius radio show...Whatever with Alexis and Jennifer. They were talking about an offensive statement that made me chuckle.
The phrase was "Jew him down". The phrase itself didn't make me chuckle...it was the memory associated with it. When I was little we got most of our furniture and appliances at a local store ran by a man known as Pothead. He was not a gentleman who walked around in a marijuana haze nor do I remember his head looking like a pot so I'm not sure where the name came. Whatever...that's not what made me chuckle either.
Every time we went there to buy something it turned into what seemed like an hours long process. Pothead and my daddy negotiated back and forth, back and forth until they finally settled on a price that made Daddy happy. One time we walked out with a new color TV and a stuffed hawk to sit on top of it. I...am...not...kidding. As a final bid my father agreed to the price only if Pothead threw in the bird.
Daddy always said he was going to "Jew Pothead down". Never having heard the word Jew I associated it with a word I did know. In my little, sheltered, hillbilly world he said he was going to "chew Pothead down". I had no idea what chewing had to do with the process but I did know all the chewing resulted in the best price.
That jogged my memory to all sorts of things I heard incorrectly when I was a kid. I was always replacing unfamiliar words with familiar words. I was some sort of weird vocabulary savant!
For instance, once when watching Gilligan's Island I was very confused because the castaways were scared of sammwiches (sandwiches for you uppity folks). Why would a bunch of people (including millionaires) marooned on an island would be afraid of a sammwich. Were they crazy??? Sometime later I realized they were afraid of savages. Oh hell...I was a kid growing up in the Appalachian Mountains! We had hill people, crazy people, drunks, and half wits but we had no savages.
Honest mistake, right? There's more...
My mother used to take quick baths in the sink every now and then. She would say, "I'm just going to take a horse bath". Nope that's not what she said but it's what I heard. She was saying "whore's bath". I was 5 years old. I had no idea what a whore was (Miss Kitty ring a bell?) or how it took a bath but I knew what a horse was and had seen the guys on Bonanza washing their horses down using buckets of water. Made sense to me that my mother took a horse bath every once in a while!!
One more...
As a child I became fixated on a song I had heard about boys named Peter. Sang it all the time but sang it at a volume of 10+ everytime The Brady Bunch came on the TV. I mean I would really belt it out....
"It was a one eyed, one horned, flyin' purple Peter eater
One eyed, one horned, flyin' purple Peter eater
A one eyed, one horned, flyin' purple Peter eater
Sure looks strange to me."
What the fuck??
You see in my childish world, I thought there was a one eyed, one horned monster that flew around and ate little boys named Peter. I sang it in honor of Peter Brady everytime the Brady Bunch came on. One day my mother yelled at me and told me to stop singing it because it wasn't nice. She didn't explain to me that peter was another name for a pecker, whacker, or dildy...which were the anatomically incorrect names we used for penis.
My goodness...I thought I was serending Peter about his possible troubles with a one eyed, one horned monster that would gobble him up when I was basically singing about a horny cyclops that ate dick. I had no choice but to grow up to become a twisted adult!!!
So was I deaf or was I dumb? I prefer to think that I was imaginative. I mean it takes an imagination to envision a bunch of Peters running around on a deserted island trying to chew down a bunch of ham sammwiches, don't you think?
Chick out...
