Away with Words

When I moved to Italy I promised myself that I'd only buy books written in Italian.  And since I usually only buy books at the secondhand shop, you can bet they're all in Italian.  Almost all.  Until the day I hit the jackpot.  It seems the other English speaker in town either died or decided she needed more room on her bookshelf because I found 17 books in English and I bought all of them.

Having broken my promise about only buying Italian books I was tough on myself and left them unread for nearly a year.  But when I decided to spend most of August on the beach I found one of the books irrestible.  On the cover in small print was praise from the Chicago Tribune, "Riveting.....the perfect summer-by-the-lake read."  Summer-by-the-lake or August-on-the-Adriatic.  It's the same difference.  

It's not like I haven't read anything in English in the past 6 years.  My emails and most of what I read on the internet are in English.  But the beach book was filled with things I hadn't thought about in ages.  The fake news about Mr. Trump doesn't use these words and phrases and I don't use them with my students either. 

They may seem like everyday terms to you, but for some reason they made me chuckle.  (And that's just the kind of word I'm talking about.)      

-lug everything back.

-the queen of cream cheese.

-shuck the corn.

-Join the club!

-If you want to go on the boat you'd better smarten up.   (Straighten up rings a bell with me.)

-Hi-C, Pop-Tarts, Easy Mac and Tretorns.

-nestled sets of measuring spoons.

-"Don't be such a spaz!"

-purple lint and dryer sheets.

-a clunker of a van.

-Hallmark cards.

-muzak coming from above.

-the milk in the fridge was iffy.

-the sprawling stripmall ugliness of Wal-Mart and Rite-Aid.

-coleslaw.

-Putt-Putt.

-after school reruns.

-he yanked it away.

-he cracked his window for some fresh air.

-A:  "I'm going to the bathroom." 
 B:  "Hope everything comes out all right."

-making his voice crazy like the commercials for the monster-truck show

-Cheetos, Fritos and dusty cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli


Rereading the list makes me wonder if they're not just words from a different country, but words from a different era.  Would a car in Chicago have been a clunker or just an old, beat-up car?  And in the nineties I think I would've opened a window, not cracked it.  Maybe this book was written in a Michigan dialect.  The dialect of my childhood.  The dialect of a contadino.  And maybe that's why I found it so riveting.