Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin
Page 23
Midwesterners have to avoid boastful mottos. Oklahoma’s license plate motto, for instance, is “Oklahoma’s OK.” If the Midwest had a regional license plate motto, it would be “No Big Deal.” Although the hamburger restaurant I was addicted to when I was growing up in Kansas City happened to have what connoisseurs agreed were the best hamburgers in the world, its motto was not “The Best Hamburgers in the World” but “Your Drinks Are Served in Sanitized Glasses.” I have to say, parenthetically, that restaurant mottos are generally weak, although I admired the motto of a barbecue restaurant in western Kentucky that specialized in barbecued mutton: “Mary Had a Little Lamb. Why Don’t You Have Some, Too.”
I’ve also been active in political mottos and campaign slogans. I suppose my most successful slogan was one I made up for a candidate who was running for mayor of Buffalo: “Never Been Indicted.” Politicians love mottos, and ever since the New Deal there have been attempts to attach motto-like names to administrations. There was a brief attempt in the Carter administration to use the motto “A New Foundation.” Every time I heard it, I could see some beady-eyed contractor standing in front of my house, shaking his head back and forth, and saying, “I’m afraid what you need, my friend, is a whole new foundation.”
By chance, this was during a period when I was imagining mottos for families in our neighborhood. The Bartletts, down the street, had the motto “A Triumph in Group Therapy.” The Bernsteins would be calling themselves “The Best Mixed Marriage Yet.” Our family tried a number of mottos, and then we settled on the one my family had used when I was a child: “Zip Up Your Jacket.”
The Reagan administration, the administration of the Great Communicator, naturally coined some lasting phrases. One of them was “the truly needy”—the people who weren’t just malingering. I wasn’t certain what they meant by “truly needy” until a lawyer from Greenwich who’d been appointed chairman of the Federal Synfuels Corporation said, in 1981, that the salary of $150,000 was so far below a living wage that he’d have to move out of Greenwich if he accepted the job. I envisioned everyone who made less than $150,000 having to move out of Greenwich. I could imagine them packing up their station wagons and heading west in a caravan, like a preppy Grapes of Wrath. I could see them in their little camps outside Lake Forest and Sewickley, making their suppers of cold breast of chicken and white wine on the tailgates. The local people, referring to the Greenwich refugees contemptuously as “Greenies,” would greatly resent them, of course, as people willing to be bank executives for $135,000 a year. Whenever the greenies would go into town for supplies—a decent piece of brie, for instance—people would say, “G’wan, we don’t need your kind here.”
Political columnists have pet phrases, mostly to hide ignorance. “Too soon to tell” is the rare phrase that permits you to sound more informed by saying you don’t know. I use it myself. If I’m asked what long-term effect on the economy the deficit is going to have, I say, “It’s too soon to tell.” The other night, one of my daughters asked me how to find the area of an isosceles triangle, and I said, “Too soon to tell.”
A few months ago, I was talking to a friend of mine named Nick, who’s sixteen, about what we always call Rule #6. When Nick was a little boy, he was a handful, and his mother got a little desperate. So she posted some rules on the refrigerator door. The only one of the rules Nick and I have been able to remember was Rule #6: “Enough’s enough.” Just after we had our chat about life under Rule #6, I read in the Times about an attempted robbery at a branch bank in Brooklyn by a sort of amateur robber. He got away with some money, but the assistant bank manager, a woman in her middle years, chased him out the door, pursued him down the street, tackled him, and had to be restrained by some passing sanitation workers from doing him serious physical damage. When she was asked why she had done all of this, she said that the bank had been robbed just six months before and “enough’s enough.”
Well, of course, the robber had no way of knowing this. I think the bank should have been required to post a warning sign, like those signs that warn you that a microwave is in use: WARNING. RULE #6 STRICTLY ENFORCED AT THIS BRANCH.
1990
Like a Scholar of Teenspeak
Things have finally returned to normal among the teenagers I know, after a spring filled with vocabulary tension brought on by the Scholastic Aptitude Tests.
“Relax,” I kept saying to S., the teenager I know best, as the pressure in her crowd mounted. “I read that a lot of colleges don’t pay much attention to SAT scores anyway. Also, you can always go to work in the dime store.”
“Relaxing would be a Herculean task—meaning a task very difficult to perform,” S. said. “Because among my friends there’s no dearth of anxieties. A dearth is like a paucity—a scarcity or scanty supply. In fact, most of the people I know have a plethora of anxieties—a surfeit, an overabundance.”
All of S.’s friends were talking that way. One evening, when we were giving S.’s friend D. a ride uptown, D. said, “I’ll be on the corner of Thirteenth and Sixth Avenue, in proximity to the mailbox.”
“In proximity?” I said.
“Kind of in juxtaposition to the mailbox,” D. said. “That’s a placing close together, or side by side. If I get tired while I’m waiting, you’ll find me contiguous to the mailbox.”
“What if someone wants to mail a letter?” I asked.
“If that eventuality—that contingent event, that possible occurrence or circumstance—occurs,” D. said, “I’ll move.”
This is not the way teenagers normally speak. Ordinarily, they don’t need many long words—or, for that matter, many words of any size. Some of them can make do for days on end with hardly any words at all beyond the word “like”—as in the sentence “Like, I said ‘Like, what?’ and he was like, ‘Like, okay.’ ”
As it happens, listening to someone who says “like” every second or third word can get irritating. When S.’s father brings that fact to her attention, in an appropriately courteous and dignified manner (“If you say ‘like’ once more at this dinner table, you’re going to be put in a foster home!”), S. can explain why each use of the word “like” is absolutely logical.
She explains that “like” in some cases is used the way a non-teenager would use “more or less” or “sort of.” She explains that “he was like” means not exactly “he said,” but something more in the order of “his speech and his manner indicated.” Her explanations sound persuasive—which is almost as irritating as listening to someone who says “like” every second or third word.
In fact, S. has logical explanations for a lot of teenage talk. She can explain why it’s okay to use “stupid” or “crazy” as adverbs meaning “very” or “truly,” so that you could say both, “that guy is stupid crazy” or, if he happens to be stupider than he is crazy, “that guy is crazy stupid.” She can explain the difference between “snapping” and “ranking”—both words for harassing or insulting—well enough to correct her parents at the dinner table, so that if her father says, “S., stop ranking on A.,” she might say, “That wasn’t a rank. It was more of a harsh snap.” S. is, like, a scholar of teenspeak.
When I thought about that fact this spring, it occurred to me that the teenagers I know wouldn’t have been under any tension at all if only the SATs were given in their own language: “Like is to like as a) like is to like, or b) like is to like.” The problem emerged from the Educational Testing Service’s stubborn insistence on giving the test in English. That hardly seems fair.
Think of how difficult it would be for nonteenagers to bone up on vocabulary if they were required to take a test in teenspeak. I can imagine, say, two golfers of middle years and competitive temperaments ready to hit their drives on the first green. Al swats his drive right down the center of the fairway and says, “Super-fly fresh! That, as you may know, is an exclamation indicating approval or delight.”
“The vocabulary test is not for another month,” Jack says irritably, as he tees
up. He hits a dribbler, and starts pounding a nearby bush with his driver.
“Chill, money,” Al says. “Which is to say: Relax.”
“Speak English!” Jack shouts.
“Like, take a chill,” Al says.
Jack turns toward Al, waving his driver in the air menacingly. Suddenly, S. emerges from behind the bush.
“It’s understandable that you have a plethora of anxieties,” she tells Jack. “But you have to make a Herculean effort to control them.”
Jack, seeing the logic in that, puts the driver in his golf bag and apologizes for the outburst. “It was stupid crazy of me,” he says.
1988
Literally
My problem with country living began innocently enough when our well ran dry and a neighbor said some pump priming would be necessary.
“I didn’t come up here to discuss economics,” I said. Actually, I don’t discuss economics in the city either. As it happens, I don’t understand economics. There’s no use revealing that, though, to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who interrupts his dinner to try to get your water running, so I said, “I come up here to get away from that sort of thing.” My neighbor gave me a puzzled look.
“He’s talking about the water pump,” Alice told me. “It needs priming.”
I thought that experience might have been just a fluke—until, on a fishing trip with the same neighbor, I proudly pulled in a fish with what I thought was a major display of deep-sea angling skill, only to hear a voice behind me say, “It’s just a fluke.”
“This is dangerous,” I said to Alice, while helping her weed the vegetable garden the next day. That morning at the post office I had overheard somebody say that since we seemed to be in for a few days of good weather, he intended to make his hay while the sun was shining. “These people are robbing me of aphorisms,” I said, pausing to rest for a while on my hoe. “How can I encourage the children to take advantage of opportunities by telling them to make hay while the sun shines if they think that means making hay while the sun shines?”
“Could you please keep weeding those peas while you talk,” she said. “You’ve got a long row to hoe.”
I began to look at Alice with new eyes. By that, of course, I don’t mean that I actually went to a discount eye outlet, acquired two new eyes (20/20 this time), replaced my old eyes with the new ones, and looked at Alice. Having to make that explanation is just the sort of thing I found troubling. What I mean is that I was worried about the possibility of Alice’s falling into the habit of rural literalism herself. My concern was deepened a few days later by a conversation that took place while I was up in one of our apple trees, looking for an apple that was not used as a dacha by the local worms. “I just talked to the Murrays, and they say that the secret is picking up windfalls,” Alice said.
“Windfalls?” I asked. “Could it be that Jim Murray has taken over Exxon since last time I saw him? Or do the Murrays have a natural gas operation in the back forty I didn’t know about?”
“Not those kinds of windfalls. The apples that fall from the tree because of the wind. They’re a breeding place for worms.”
“There’s nothing wrong with our apples,” I said, reaching for a particularly plump one.
“Be careful,” Alice said. “You may be getting yourself too far out on a limb.”
At breakfast the next morning I said to Alice, “You may be getting yourself too far out on a limb yourself.”
She looked around the room. “I’m sitting at the kitchen table,” she said.
“I meant it symbolically,” I said. “The way it was meant to be meant. This has got to stop. I won’t have you coming in from the garden with small potatoes in your basket and saying that what you found was just small potatoes. ‘Small potatoes’ doesn’t mean small potatoes.”
“Small potatoes doesn’t mean small potatoes?”
“I refuse to discuss it,” I said. “The tide’s in, so I’m going fishing, and I don’t want to hear any encouraging talk about that fluke not being the only fish in the sea.”
“I was just going to ask why you have to leave before you finish your breakfast,” she said.
“Because time and tide wait for no man,” I said. “And I mean it.”
As I dropped in my line, I wondered if she’d trapped me into saying that. Or was it possible that I was falling into the habit myself? Then I had a bite—then another. I forgot about the problem until after I had returned to the dock and done my most skillful job of filleting.
“Look!” I said, holding up the carcass of one fish proudly, as Alice approached the dock. “It’s nothing but skin and bones.”
The shock of realizing what I had said caused me to stumble against my fish-cleaning table and knock the fillets off the dock. “Now we won’t have anything for dinner,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Alice said. “I have other fish to fry.”
“That’s not right!” I shouted. “That’s not what that means. It means you have something better to do.”
“It can also mean that I have other fish to fry. And I do. I’ll just get that other fish you caught out of the freezer. Even though it was just a fluke.”
I tried to calm myself. I apologized to Alice for shouting and offered to help her pick vegetables from the garden for dinner.
“I’ll try to watch my language,” she said, as we stood among the peas.
“It’s all right, really,” I replied.
“I was just going to say that tonight it seems rather slim pickings,” she said. “Just about everything has gone to seed.”
“Perfectly all right,” I said, wandering over toward the garden shed, where some mud seemed to be caked in the eaves. I pushed at the mud with a rake, and a swarm of hornets burst out at me. I ran for the house, swatting at hornets with my hat. Inside, I suddenly had the feeling that some of them had managed to crawl up the legs of my jeans, and I tore the jeans off. Alice found me there in the kitchen, standing quietly in what the English call their smalls.
“That does it,” I said. “We’re going back to the city.”
“Just because you stirred up a hornet’s nest?”
“Can’t you see what happened?” I said. “They scared the pants off me.”
1981
Roland Magruder, Freelance Writer
During the first week of summer, at a beach party in East Hampton, a portly man wearing tan Levi’s and a blue-and-white gondolier’s shirt told Marlene Nopkiss that he was a “socioeconomic observer” currently working on a study entitled “The Appeal of Chinese Food to Jewish Intellectuals.” Marlene had already suggested that the rejection of one dietary ritual might lead inevitably to the adoption of another when it occurred to her that he might not be telling the truth. Later in the evening, she was informed that the man was in fact the assistant accountant of a trade magazine catering to the pulp-and-paper industry. She was more cautious a few days later, nodding without commitment when a man she met at a grocery store in Amagansett said he spent almost all of his time “banging away at the old novel.” A few days later, she saw his picture in an advertisement that a life-insurance company had taken in The New York Times to honor its leading salesmen in the New York–New Jersey–Connecticut area. She eventually decided that men automatically misrepresent their occupations in the summer on the eastern end of Long Island, as if some compulsion to lie were hanging in the air just east of Riverhead. The previous summer, in another Long Island town, everybody had said he was an artist of one kind or another; the year before that, in a town not ten miles away, men had claimed to be mystical wizards of the New York Stock Exchange. Around East Hampton, she seemed to meet nobody who did not claim to be a writer. When Marlene drove past the Sunday-morning softball game in East Hampton, she was fond of saying—even though she was invariably alone—“There stand eighteen freelance writers, unless they’re using short-fielders today, in which case there stand twenty freelance writers.” Marlene was beginning to pride herself on her cynicism.
“A freelance writer,” said Magruder, who was quite aware of how difficult she was to impress with this approach, and had even heard odds quoted on the matter.
“What kind of freelance writer?” asked Marlene.
“A sign writer.”
“A sign painter?”
“No,” said Magruder. “I write signs. Cities retain me to write signs on a freelance basis. I specialize in traffic work. YIELD RIGHT OF WAY is a good example.”
“Somebody wrote YIELD RIGHT OF WAY?” asked Marlene.
“I wrote YIELD RIGHT OF WAY,” said Magruder, permitting a tone of pride to creep into his voice. “Do you think something like YIELD RIGHT OF WAY writes itself? Do you think it was written by the gorilla who installed the signs on the expressway? He would have probably written LET THE OTHER GUY KEEP IN FRONT OF YA. Have you been going under the impression that VEHICLES WEIGHING OVER FIVE TONS KEEP RIGHT was composed by John V. Lindsay?”
“But these messages are obvious,” argued Marlene.
“You would have probably said that it was obvious for Brigham Young to say ‘This is the place’ when the Mormons reached Utah, or for Pétain to say ‘They shall not pass,’ or for MacArthur to say ‘I shall return.’ I suppose you think those lines just happened to come out of their mouths, without any previous thought or professional consultation. I think, by the way, if I may say so, that my NO PASSING says everything ‘They shall not pass’ says, and without succumbing to prolixity.”