Brainstorming about history, politics, literature, religion, and other topics from a 'gypsy' scholar on a wagon hitched to a star.
A Hillbilly Uncle in the Ozarks: "I had a barn to burn."
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 4:50 PM
3 comments
I am a retired professor. I last taught at Ewha Womans University, mostly composition, research writing, and cultural issues, but also the occasional graduate seminar on Gnosticism and Johannine theology and the occasional undergraduate course on European history. My doctorate is in history (U.C. Berkeley), with emphasis on religion and science. My thesis is on John's gospel and Gnosticism. I'm also an award-winning writer, and I recommend my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, to anyone interested. I'm originally from the Arkansas Ozarks, but my academic career -- funded through doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships (e.g., Fulbright, Naumann, Lady Davis) -- has taken me through Texas, California, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Israel and has landed me in Seoul, South Korea. I've also traveled to Mexico, visited much of Europe, including Moscow, and touched down briefly in a few East Asian countries. Hence: "Gypsy Scholar."
3 Comments:
I tried Googling the exact expression "I had a barn to burn" and got only a handful of search results, one of which was this blog post. I still have no clue what the expression means. Is it anything like, "I had a bone to pick with [so-and-so]"? Or is it more along the lines of, "I got sumpin' urgent to do"? Or is it just an idiomatic way of saying a fella desperately needs to take a dump (you know: the barn is burning, so you gotta let them big, brown horses outta the barn)?
It was an ordinary hillbilly way of saying "A barn that I owned burned down."
The Harvard grad pretended to understand it as meaning that my uncle had possessed a barn for the sole purpose of burning it down.
Jeffery Hodges
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Just looked at your search results. Interesting. I, too, wonder what the expression meant in those other-than-GS instances.
Jeffery Hodges
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