Lighthouse Cliché

Lighthouse

There's a venerable old prosaicism what says a platitude's nothing more than a flat attitude with a shibbolethic bromide as its lighthouse cliché.

"Patriarch of Goalies"

Jim Scott

"Patriarch of Goalies"

(Image from Jeanie's Slides)

Life is frighteningly serious these days, what with its Islamist terrorists, its financial crises, its presidential elections, but we sometimes just have to take a break and simply enjoy a game.

Apparently, my old high school math teacher, Mr. Jim Scott, feels the same way . . . or at least got roped into a impromptu game of soccer and accepted the position of goalie. Either way, he must have done a respectable job, for he earned the designation "Patriarch of Goalies" from his daughter Jeanie, who sent me this image above, along with 22 others in a slideshow.

I don't recall Jim being a soccer fan back in the old days. He certainly didn't care much for baseball or basketball, the only sports around my hometown parts back then, and once told me that he only enjoyed bareback bronco riding in rodeos, which he had done in his youthful days as a cowboy. He found the other riders -- the very ones with whom he was competing -- to be downright chivalrous in giving one another tips on what move a particular horse would make and how one could successfully counter that move.

The summer that I worked for him as a chainman on his surveying crew, we kept encountering folks in the backwoods areas of the Ozarks who knew Jim from his cowboying days. Those days had been only two decades earlier, but I was merely 19, so those 20 years seemed like antiquity. Jim was 44 when I worked for him, so he must be about 76 now, but he still looks quite fit in the photo above.

Jim was a fine mathematician, so far as I know anything about that, but he was also a sometime art teacher, a one-time music teacher, an anytime mechanic who could disassemble and reassemble a truck engine, a long-time homebuilder who built his own home, and probably a lot of other many-time things that I don't know about.

Anyway, if you're into family-oriented activities, here's Jeanie's slideshow of the impromptu soccer game that took place on their Ozark farm.

A little rewriting...

In the image of the Ozarks

My process of estrangement...

(Image from Wikipedia)

Poetry may be -- as Wordsworth and Coleridge put it in their "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads (1800) -- "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . from emotion recollected in tranquility" (though it ain't), but prose requires a lot of rewriting.

Consequently, I've already been rewriting my "Lost in Translation" paper. In my musings on archaic words used in the Ozarks, I draw upon my first encounter with the word "antigogglin," which I heard when I was working as a chainman with a surveying crew that took me into some pretty isolated mountainous areas:

One tough place was on an isolated part of the Spring River valley, where we were looking for a corner marker to set up the surveying instrument and where I learned a new old Ozark word. Trying to get our bearings, we asked an old hillbilly -- in his 70s, I reckon -- if he knew where the marker, a metal spike driven into the ground, was located.

"Yeah," he replied, his face wrinkling with concentration, "but you got to go antigogglin over that hill to get there."

Anti-what!? I thought. But it was pretty clear what the word meant -- the way wasn't straight, which was what we had figured all along.

Some readers may recognize this passage, for I've lifted it from a blog entry of about one year ago. As you've also probably noted, I've been cannibalizing my blog for this 'translation' paper, so the passage quoted above appears in my paper as well. I follow this passage with an explanation of "antigogglin" that segues into a reflection on how my 'misuse' of words in a university environment led me to some glimmers of insight into "Semantic Drift" (also the title of a slightly off-color poem that I've written):

According to the Dictionary of American Regional English, Volume 1, "antigoglin" -- which has various spellings (annigoglin, antegogglin' and antigogglin(g)) -- is used as either adjective or adverb, with the meaning "askew, out of plumb" and "Slantwise, diagonal(ly)," and comes from "anti-" (against, counter) and "goggling" (from goggle, to shake, tremble). That sounds about how the old hillbilly was using this extraordinary old word. We Ozarkers also used ordinary words in unusual, archaic ways, for example, "stout" in the older sense of "strong" rather than its contemporary American meaning of "fat," a difference that occasioned a number of embarrassing linguistic missteps for me when I left the Ozarks for university, for in the campus gym where I exercised and played basketball, I happened to call some rather powerfully built bodybuilders "stout," which they took to mean that I was calling them "obese." Some of the female athletes whom I occasionally played basketball with also took none too kindly to the term. Eventually, I learned from these inadvertently otstranennyye(n) exercises in estrangement (cf. Selden et al., 33f).

This passage above presents an example of the rewriting that my prose requires on its way toward clarity, for I've already posted it on this blog, albeit in less expanded form. The expansion that you see takes my anecdotal experiences and moves them toward scholarship (the etymological information from Frederic G. Cassidy's Dictionary of American Regional English, Volume 1 (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985)) and toward literary theory (the Russian Formalism allusion from Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, and Peter Brooker, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (London: Prentice Hall, 1997)). Both moves are intended to make my paper conform more appropriately to the conference theme: translation.

But that might not be quite so evident from this blog entry...

Chainman

Gunter's Chain

Image Source: David Manthey

(Chain-Linked via Wikipedia to David Manthey)

Back in the hot, humid Arkansas summer of 1976, I worked for Jim Scott as a chainman.

Scott was a mathematician and surveyor who also had musical and artistic talent and could draw well and even paint despite his red-green colorblindness. He also had (and still has, I presume) an IQ of nearly 190 ... whatever that implies, some sort of high intelligence, certainly.

Scott was a tough boss but fair-minded, and I learned a lot about intelligent self-reliance -- in contrast to my innate contrariness -- by observing him and reflecting over the years on what I had observed.

The first thing that he taught me was how to 'twist-fold' a chain ... and not really a chain, either, despite the image above. What we used was a 66-foot metal band to measure off land in the wilds of the Ozarks. He then showed me how to use a surveyor's spirit level, the old, hand-held type for judging how high the other chainman should hold the chain.

Such as: "Hold the chain about pecker high, right about the knees!" Or so the older hillbilly working the other end of the chain used to call out whenever the slope of the ground that he was standing on had brought him so low.

That hillbilly was a humorous fellow. Once, when our head surveyor offered me a chew of tobacco that I declined, my fellow chainman suggested that the next time I got offered a chew, I should reply, "No thanks, I don't even chew horsesh-t."

Most of the time, though, we were not chewing even the fat but lugging around our chain, surveyor's level, hatchet, plumb bob, hammer, laths, stakes, and other equipment through thickets where we had to cut a line, and up and down hollows that forced us to measure off shorter segments (increasing error) or much longer segments at angles (increasing labor).

One tough place was on an isolated part of the Spring River valley, where we were looking for a corner marker to set up the surveying instrument and where I learned a new old Ozark word. Trying to get our bearings, we asked an old hillbilly -- in his 70s, I reckon -- if he knew where the marker, a metal spike driven into the ground, was located.

"Yeah," he replied, his face wrinkling with concentration, "but you got to go antigogglin over that hill to get there."

Anti-what!? I thought. But it was pretty clear what the word meant -- the way wasn't straight, which was what we had figured all along.

At home, I asked my grandmother if she knew the word antigogglin, and I explained the situation.

"Yes," she said, "I know it."

"What does it mean?" I asked.

"It means that you have to go all over the place to get somewhere," she told me, explaining its meaning in the context.

I took that word with me to college and have used it ever since.