Fathers Say the Darndest Things

Reading The Liars' Club and Cherry (Mary Karr's second memoir) over the holidays, one thing I was struck by was her parents' use of language. Especially her father's. As Karr comments in Liars' Club, he was not an educated man, certainly not a big reader, but he did have that Texas talent for vivid and colorful phrasing, which, combined with his natural storytelling talent (like father, like daughter) must have made him a most companionable person, over a cold beer or two. You are not liable to forget comparisons such as, A face ugly enough to "make a freight train take a dirt road."

That most of this casual poetry was not original is beside the point ... or rather is the most important point. Often it's the most ordinary men and women, the closest at hand and/or taken for granted, who are the repositories of our most vibrant language. If we want to get all T.S. Eliot-ic for a moment we could call this "the dialect of the tribe," but it would probably better to mention another phrase (from a source I'm afraid I can't recall): older people are "walking Smithsonians."

Wishing I'd paid closer attention to what the older generation said when I was growing up in Ireland, where often there's a second language haunting the syntax and diction of the first, I've become a better listener (I hope) in the last few years during homecoming conversations with older relatives.

They can still astonish me by throwing in a word or phrase I'd never heard before in my life. A couple of years ago, discussing a friend's uncharacteristic behavior, a cousin of mine said, "Ah ... he just took a figary." My reaction was, "He took a what?" "A notion," my cousin explained, "to go wandering off." Well, I was more interested in the word than the story. My cousin thought that figary was from the Irish (the Gaelic), as is so often the case with these words. After consulting a fluent Irish speaker and a dictionary or two, I discovered that figary was actually an old English word that lives on in Ireland as one of those verbal fossils (y'all have them in Texas, too). In fact, it's a version of vagary. Mystery solved, and one more little treasure transfered to a ... slightly younger walking Smithsonian.

In her memoirs, Mary Karr writes about a few figaries of her own (not to mention her parents). But beside the wonderful stories in the books there's also the richness of the language--her language, tempered by poetry; and the language of other, older folk, some of whom would never have dreamed that their words were the stuff of literature.

Posted on Tue, January 5, 2010 by Robert Cremins

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