They’re At It Again

Tags

Conservation Department, idiocy, legislature, Missouri

I’ve had my issues with the Missouri Department of Conservation. But for the most part, it’s the one agency of state government that you can usually rely on to work in a nonpartisan way, with a clear mission focus and a modest ability to disregard the momentary winds of opinion. Take, for example, the department’s recent decision to create a bear hunting season in the state, which an overwhelming majority of the public comments disagreed with. If the department needed to bend to public opinion, it wouldn’t have shrugged off the public comments with such ease.

This nonpartisan emphasis, naturally, has been a burr under the saddle of the state legislature for decades. The idea that an agency of government could stand apart from politics is anathema to them. That agency could be such a source of influence, such a repository of bureaucratic jobs to fill, such a wellspring of votes! And so it has tried, again and again, to grab control over the Conservation Department, which is protected in its structure by the state constitution. Never mind the fact that Missouri’s Conservation Department is just about the only aspect of state government that is envied elsewhere.

The latest effort began as a bill sponsored by the representative from my hometown, and would have changed the membership of the Missouri Conservation Commission from appointed to elected, thus politicizing it completely. The representative claimed that members would run on a nonpartisan basis, but we know how “nonpartisan” that works in practice. So the new plan, which has passed a House committee, would insert both the House and the Senate into the nomination process, assuring that new appointments would have to pass the political scrutiny of legislative leaders before taking their positions. Even in this dressed-up version, it’s still such an atrociously bad idea that the House speaker had to pack the committee with a bunch of extra members to get the proposal to pass.

Every session, I think to myself that the Missouri Legislature cannot possibly come up with a more reactionary, hare-brained, backward set of proposals than they did in the previous session, and every session they prove me wrong. This year’s crop looks to continue that trend, with proposals to make it easier for people to evade vaccination requirements and to hamstring local health departments (in the middle of a pandemic!) at the top of the list. A fair number of these ideas end up on the scrap heap, thank goodness, but enough of them get through to make one despair whether Missouri will ever become the moderate, sensible, “Show-Me” state I remember from my younger days.

Teenie Dees from Turkey Creek

Tags

lost communities, memory, newspapers, Wayne County

When I was a young reporter, I worked for a weekly newspaper that had “community correspondents.” Country folk of a certain age will know what the term means. Every little community in the county had a correspondent, usually a longtime resident and almost always female, who would write up an account of the goings-on in the community for the week: church suppers, visitors in and out, illnesses, revivals, and occasionally items of greater news value. Their payment was typically a free subscription.

My job was to convert the correspondents’ reports into usable copy. This task varied from one person to another. Some correspondents sent neatly typed reports, correctly spelled and punctuated, leaving me little to do besides check for style issues and insert paragraphing where needed. Other columns arrived in wadded bundles of notebook paper, scribbled out in ancient handwriting, nearly indecipherable.

Such was the news from Turkey Creek. The Turkey Creek community lay in the east end of the county, far from any towns. It had lost its post office and school some years back. But it was still a voting precinct; on election night, Turkey Creek was usually the last to report, with its thirty votes. And it still had its community correspondent, whose name was Dees.

I never met Mrs. Dees, but she reported in from Turkey Creek faithfully, her handwritten message arriving every week. Things were slow on Turkey Creek most of the time, but she did her best to liven up her column with observations about the changing seasons and the condition of the roads. She always referred to herself in the third person, following some notion of proper style, and appeared to travel everywhere with a daughter, or perhaps a granddaughter, who went by Teenie. Perhaps that was her actual name. Mrs. Dees and Teenie traveled to Poplar Bluff and Greenville, and they visited neighbors. Teenie spent overnights with friends. And all was duly recorded in the News from Turkey Creek.

As a young college-educated smartass, I regarded Mrs. Dees’ news of Teenie with mockery, although I never let it show around the office. The owners knew the family and respected them. But at night, over beers with my friends, I would laugh at the tedious, inconsequential doings of Mrs. Dees and Teenie. The pinnacle of humor came with a three-week sequence of columns in which she took note (first week) that a dog had died just above the low-water bridge, and that the county road crew needed to come out and take care of it. Second week, the dog remained, and had become increasingly foul. Mrs. Dees expressed horror and again called upon the road department. By the third week’s column, Mrs. Dees had stopped the car and gone over to inspect, informing us that to her great disgust the dog had swelled to the point that a person could no longer tell if it was male or female. Fourth week, no report. Either the county or the scavengers took notice.

Only in later years did I reflect on Mrs. Dees’ column and its significance. Turkey Creek had been a logging community, building up after the turn of the century to decent size, with its own tram line to Greenville, where a person could connect to the larger world. After the log boom came to an end, Turkey Creek and its sister communities on the east side of the county began their slow slide to oblivion. After the post office and school were gone, what was left? The Baptist church, the polling place, and the weekly newspaper report.

What I thought of as silly nonsense was the last assertive echo: We are a place, we are people, we are still here, we mean something. Nowadays I don’t laugh about the travels of Teenie. I cherish them, and I wish Mrs. Dees had told us more.

Old Hymns and Odd Images

Tags

Bible, hymns, lyrics, music, poetry, Robert Robinson

I’ve made my fondness for old hymns known before. I grew up with them, and even today an old hymn will get stuck in my head for days at a time.

Such is the case with “Come, Thou Fount,” one of the hymns that was an evergreen favorite in my childhood church, and one of those that has maintained a surprising popularity among contemporary pop Christian groups and singers, although as usual they can’t keep from tweaking it to make it more “modern,” adding choruses or smoothing out the lyrics to suit today’s sensibilities.

“Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” to give its full title, was written in the mid-1700s by a 22-year-old English pastor and hymnodist named Robert Robinson. Like most hymns of the era, it came unattached to a particular tune. The tune we associate it with the most is an American tune of somewhat obscure origin called “Nettleton,” named after the Connecticut evangelist and composer Asahel Nettleton, who may or may not have written it. The tune has a kind of thumping, straightforward tread that is one reason it sticks in the mind so easily: de de BUMP BUMP, de de BUMP BUMP, and so forth.

Robert Robinson, from Wikipedia.

But what draws me to “Come, Thou Fount” are its lyrics. They’re kind of a mishmash, really, but in such interesting ways. Take the first lines. “Come, thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy praise. Streams of mercy never ceasing call for songs of loudest praise.” This gives us a hint of what we’re in for. God is a fountain, and also a kind of cosmic piano tuner. The two images are intermingled through the verse. One might say Robinson is mixing his metaphors here, or that this tumbled mix is just what he’s aiming for, in the sense that God is too big to be contained in a single metaphorical framework.

The second verse relies on what to most people today is a very obscure Biblical reference: “Here I raise mine Ebenezer, here by Thy great help I’ve come.” But believers in Robinson’s time would have recognized the reference as coming from 1 Samuel, in a verse in which Samuel erects a monument stone at the site of a victory over the Philistines. Samuel calls it “Stone of Help,” or Eben-Ezer in the English transliteration of the Hebrew, and the word came to signify a place of victory by divine intervention. The legendary Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta takes its name from this passage, as do thousands of other “Ebenezer” churches around the country. So the hymn is a victory paean.

But no, it’s not, for a couple of verses later come an amazing set of lines. “O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be! Let Thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee.” The grace of God is phrased in terms of debt and imprisonment, which in 18th-century England would have been painfully familiar. For Robinson, who was disinherited at age five with ten shillings and sixpence, debt and imprisonment would have been a present concern. And then the desperate plea: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above.” It’s easy to imagine the 22-year-old writer, engaged in his own struggles, pouring out this cry. The whole hymn is a tumbling-out of varied figures of speech, tones, and images, following on each other and sometimes weaving together. No wonder people have felt the urge to clean it up a bit for the audiences of their day!

But I like the tangled, almost synesthetic quality of “Come, Thou Fount.” As the tune goes marching along in steady pace, the lyrics are bouncing all over the place. It’s a mixed-up flow of thoughts for mixed-up minds, and I like it just like that.

Rugged Individualism and Simple Bullheadedness

Tags

COVID-19, government, individualism, Mary Calhoun, Matthew Holloway, public health, self-reliance, stubbornness, Three Kinds of Stubborn

One of my favorite stories comes from my mother, who was visiting a nursing home one day when she happened to overhear a resident being comforted by his pastor. The resident was an old farmer, whose infirmities and age had consigned him to the home, and he was bemoaning his fate and wishing he could end it all. The pastor assured him that the simple fact he was alive meant that his purpose in life was not over, and that God still had something He wanted him to do.

The old coot considered this for a moment. “Well, I ain’t a-gonna do it,” he said.

Every time I think of this story I am reminded of Mary Calhoun’s marvelous 1972 children’s book Three Kinds of Stubborn, in which three stubborn Missourians get into a family dispute that keeps worsening because of their refusal to abandon their eccentric positions. The book is a gentle lesson in bending, in recognizing that none of us has a corner on truth, and in the wisdom of listening to others.

Stubbornness is a version of pride, an insistence that my opinion is superior to all others and that nobody has a right to tell me what to do. And pride, convention tells us, is a sin. In some ways, this stance is connected to the rural tradition of individualism and self-reliance, which I ordinarily think of as a virtue; but there are times when individualism and self-reliance become a hindrance rather than a help.

This is such a time, as I watch with dismay my fellow-citizens behave with deliberate and truculent ignorance toward those who need their help and who are trying to help them. The COVID pandemic requires concerted, collective action, with everyone pitching in to slow the spread of the virus by following a few simple health measures, and a coordinated government effort to enforce those health measures and to trace the contacts of those who come down with the illness. Instead, we see widespread refusal to wear masks, regular occurences of spreader events that pass the virus among groups, and a deliberately feeble government response in the name of “freedom” that allows cases to skyrocket.

My morning newspaper reports 105 people in the hospital with COVID today, a new record for the county, including 29 in intensive care and 16 on ventilators. The twist in this report is that only 20 out of the 105 are from Boone County, where I live. The other 85 are from outstate, from rural counties that don’t have the hospital capacity to treat them, or possibly don’t have a hospital at all. If “out of sight, out of mind” is true, then I would imagine that some inhabitants of these rural counties might not have a clear idea of just how widespread and dangerous this epidemic is, since the patients are whisked away to a distant hospital and their local government officials appear to be taking great pains to keep them in the dark. The state government’s COVID dashboard remains consistently behind the true numbers; if you want an accurate picture of the extent of COVID in Missouri, I recommend that you follow Matthew Holloway on Facebook. He’s a private citizen who, along with a number of helpers, has made it his personal mission to comb through local health department reports, media reports, and other public sources to come up with an accurate day-to-day account of the virus in Missouri.

It shouldn’t be this way. We shouldn’t have to argue with our fellow-citizens over simple health measures. We shouldn’t have to rely on motivated citizens to give us accurate statistics. Sometimes “I ain’t a-gonna to do it” is an admirable expression of defiance to the ruffian gods. Sometimes it’s just an obstinate refusal to acknowledge the obvious.

New Book!

Tags

books, Cornerpost Press, short stories, West Plains, writing

I’m thrilled to announce that I have a new book coming out this fall! Unlike my earlier books, this one is a collection of short stories. The title is Scattered Lights….that’s a line from one of the stories, and (in my mind) an appropriate metaphor for the people in the stories, and the stories themselves: a collection of things that may seem random at first, but which are deeply and firmly connected, if only we take the time to look. Release date is projected for November.

I’ve started a Scattered Lights page on my website and will be placing news about the book on it, for the most part, although I’ll put headlines here occasionally, too. The publisher is Cornerpost Press, a new venture out of West Plains, and they have been absolutely magical to work with! I think this new book will look great.

And for those of you who only know me through my novels, I think the stories will provide a different look. They’re not set in historical times, but in the contemporary setting.

Patriotic Songs – 7

Tags

America, American Tune, history, music, patriotic songs, Paul Simon, social comment

(Photo from the Library of Congress)

Independence Day approaches, so it’s time to think about patriotic songs again. In the past, I’ve written about “America, the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and others. So it’s definitely time for an update.

I wrote earlier that I preferred “America, the Beautiful” to “The Star-Spangled Banner” as our national anthem, partly because of its singability and partly because of its tone. It’s a celebration of America in all its variety and thus appropriate for all times, while “The Star-Spangled Banner” is a battle song, more suitable for wartime spirit-rousing than for reflection on our blessings. (In a future post I’ll write about America’s other great battle song, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”). In our current turmoil over public symbolism, Francis Scott Key’s checkered history as a slaveowner who also criticized slavery has made him a problematic figure, similar to Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and a great number of important historic figures whose past deserves re-examination. I doubt if “The Star-Spangled Banner” will ever lose its place at ball games and public events, though, now that it’s ingrained in people’s minds, so I’ll let that debate pass.

A friend of mine used to say, only half-joking, that Paul Simon’s “American Tune” should be our national anthem, as it reflected the American spirit nowadays a lot better than the songs from the 19th Century do. I’d like to think a little about “American Tune,” because it confronts us with the question of what a patriotic song is, and what it isn’t.

“American Tune” was written in 1972 and released in 1973, and Simon told an interviewer that it was written in response to the re-election of Richard Nixon. The tune was taken from Bach’s setting of “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” from the St. Matthew Passion, a melody that has been used for other songs over the years, notably “Because All Men Are Brothers,” which was on an early album by Peter, Paul, and Mary. The lyrics are, in my opinion, among Simon’s best. They combine his penchant for surreal imagery with direct and emotional statements, and they convey a sense of weariness combined with resolution that we can all appreciate.

The song begins with a sense of defeat: souls battered, dreams shattered, friends ill at ease. But that sense is tempered by reassurance: “It’s all right,” the chorus reassures us, although just what “all right” means is rather subdued. It’s all right because we lived so well so long, and it’s all right because you can’t be forever blessed: not exactly words to march into battle with. The song’s most memorable moment, the one that everyone remembers, comes in the bridge section. The speaker has had a dream. I dreamed I was dying, he says, but this dream is all right, for his soul looks down and smiles reassuringly. Then I dreamed I was flying, and this time when he looks up, he sees “The Statue of Liberty / Sailing away to sea.” Liberty itself has fled the scene.

The final verse sums it up:

We come on a ship they call the Mayflower

We come on a ship that sails the moon.

We come in the age’s most uncertain hour

And sing an American tune.

Is it a patriotic song? Of course it is. It expresses deep feelings of loving concern about the country, at a time when “love it or leave it” was a popular slogan. As we reflect on our history today, with renewed examination of our under-told stories, our under-examined monuments, and the challenges posed by our historic symbols and slogans, we owe it to ourselves that patriotism doesn’t rule out criticism and love of country mustn’t blind us in those moments when the Statue of Liberty appears to have sailed away.

Juneteenth, Part Two

Tags

Black Lives Matter, Eminence, flag, Fredericktown, Free speech, Madison County, protests, racism, Shannon County

A week ago, I posted some reflections on the Juneteenth observances around the country, and remarked that we still have a long way to go before the legacy of slavery is cleared away, or even rendered less harmful than it remains today. At the time, I wasn’t thinking in particularly immediate terms, but two days ago an event in my hometown brought that observation to life in a particularly ugly way.

A group of (mostly) young folks organized a demonstration in the courthouse square in Fredericktown, Missouri, the place where I grew up for the first ten years of my life and where I still have family connections and strong emotional ties. That’s a picture of them above, and another one here:

Threatening-looking, aren’t they?

Apparently the rumor mill had been active before the event, with the current crazy talk of “busloads of protesters” and such. A local businessman organized a counter-demonstration, and it attracted a sizable crowd of racists, nutcases, curiosity-seekers, and, presumably, some decent-minded people. Here’s a few of them:

The counter-demonstrators, many of whom were heavily armed, attempted to disrupt and intimidate the demonstrators by circling the courthouse square with their speakers blaring, trying to drown them out, and more troubling, they positioned themselves in high positions above the demonstrators with weapons visible:

I’m no weapons expert, but that sure looks like a silencer or flash suppressor on the rifle in that last photo.

The groups exchanged some yelling, but thankfully the police (who were considerably outnumbered) managed to keep the counter-demonstrators from attacking the demonstrators for the most part, although eyewitnesses said the counter-demonstrators were clearly looking for an excuse to start violence. At one point one of the demonstrators attempted to unfurl an American flag and was attacked by one of the counter-demonstrators, who was clearly armed:

You can see the outline of his pistol pretty plainly in this photo. These last two pictures, by the way, are from Ramblin Hamlin Photography, which was on the scene. I took the other pictures from Imgur.

The most aggressive act from the demonstrators, by contrast, might have been a slightly ragged version of the Electric Slide (that’s right, the Electric Slide):

(also from Ramblin Hamlin Photography)

Social media has been burning up since then, with two major themes: Those racists don’t represent our community – we’re good people! (Or at least I’m not a racist) and A lot of those demonstrators weren’t from Fredericktown – why didn’t they protest in their own town? Both good issues to raise. I guess my thought on the first one is that if you don’t want a bunch of racist lunatics to represent your community, at least in the minds of others, then you had better get out there and join the demonstration and make sure that your community comes down firmly on the side of racial justice. Otherwise the people who see the pictures will believe that the racists do represent you, because you have allowed them to. And on the second point, the home location of the demonstrators is not relevant for the same reason. I am told that one of the most obnoxious counter-demonstrators, who made gestures and said things that I will not describe or repeat here, was from Centerville. Well, if he got to come to the Madison County Courthouse and make a fool of himself, then I suppose some kids from Farmington are just as entitled to come down and demonstrate.

It saddens me to see such a disgraceful display in my hometown. Yes, Fredericktown has lots of lovely, non-racist people in it. Some of them showed up in the courthouse square on Wednesday, only to be spat at, threatened, and called vile names. So now the town is branded as a racist haven in the eyes of others, and if the citizens want to have that label removed, they’ll have to do it themselves by their words and deeds.

A COUPLE OF UPDATES: One of the demonstrators contacted me and let me know that some of the heavily armed, camouflage-wearing militia members actually performed a beneficial service, helping to keep the mob away from the demonstrators and escorting them to their cars and to the bathroom. That was good to hear, and it complicates the easy black-and-white narrative.

In addition, the town of Eminence, in Shannon County, came close to out-embarrassing Fredericktown on Saturday, the 27th. The sheriff there, in the midst of a re-election campaign, announced on social media that he had received a “credible threat,” which quickly brought the same unfounded rumors of “busloads of BLM and Antifa rioters” and resulted in about a hundred people, once again armed to the teeth, who parked at the courthouse or circled the square, crowing about their patriotism and vowing violence on any protesters who dared to show up. Video footage of this event shows a weird, carnival-like atmosphere, a combination of party and lynch mob. As it turned out, the “credible threat” was a complaint from a mother who was unhappy with the investigation of the 2018 death of her son, and the whole BLM/Antifa thing was complete baloney.  I’m not sure which community has cast itself in a worse light: the one that had an ugly response to an actual demonstration, or the one that had an ugly response to an imaginary one.

Juneteenth

Tags

Juneteenth, racism, rural life

Today is Juneteenth, an unofficial holiday that grew out of a relatively obscure event, but one which has gained increased significance these days. We are in troubled times now, but I think this day is still worth celebrating. We don’t have any official holidays to celebrate the ending of slavery in the United States; the ratification of the 13th Amendment occurred on December 6, and the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, with an effective date of January 1. But Juneteenth has the virtue of spontaneity and an up-from-the-grassroots spirit, so it works even better as a day of commemoration.

In my ideal world, the anniversary of the end of slavery would be celebrated with national pride and a sense of relief, accompanied by resolutions on how to do better at wiping out the remainder of that American stain, a solemn day but also a joyous one. For now, though, I think more about the distance yet to travel than about the distance already gone, significant though it is. The last several weeks have demonstrated with painful clarity the inequities still present in our society, so this year’s mood is more about cleaning wounds than about celebrating progress.

I remember my own upbringing, in a tiny, lily-white school in a rural district. There were a couple of African-American kids on basketball teams in our conference, but that was my only contact with African-Americans other than television, until 4-H camp one year when there were others in my cabin. But really, until college I had no practical contact with families of another race.  So I still have a lot of ground to catch up, even at my age. As a teacher, I had a fair number of African-American students, and dealing with them was a wonderful learning experience for me. I even had one of my former students call me “a favorite professor” recently, which I wear as a tremendous badge of honor.

Simply put, in the area where I grew up, casual racism was the norm. I remember after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, the mother of one of my classmates offered her take on the situation in the most vulgar, racist language imaginable, shocking me to my core. My parents had brought me up to be considerate of others and had taught me the evil of racism, and to hear it spoken aloud by a trusted elder was devastating. I would like to imagine our country has outgrown those attitudes, but I know it’s not true. Another former classmate recently posted a remark on social media that was flat-out racist. Some of us called him on it, but he was unrepentant. I suppose the only difference is that fewer people nowadays (I hope) hold such beliefs, and that others are more willing to challenge them. But racism is alive and well.

I’ve been listening to the Slow Burn podcast on the career of David Duke, and it’s disheartening. I’d like to think that we’ve gotten past people like him. Unfortunately, the road ahead of us is probably as long as the road behind.

 

Remembering Robert E. Smith

Tags

art, Crystal Payton, Leland Payton, poetry, Robert E Smith, Springfield

Several years ago, I posted a reminiscence of Robert E. Smith, a unique character and “outsider artist” with an unmistakable painting style and a sensibility that was nearly impossible to categorize.

I didn’t know this at the time, but it turns out that my fellow Ozarks writers Leland and Crystal Payton had a much longer and closer relationship with him. They recently posted some thoughts about him on his birthday, on their website, HyperCommon. Here’s a link. They also posted a link to a profile of Smith that they published in 1993, which contains many of his insights and comments about his artwork. Here’s a link to that one.

May they continue to flourish, the outsiders, the uncategorizable, the eccentrics and the oddballs. What a drab world it would be without them!

Old-Fashioned Words

Tags

etymology, history, Jane Hamilton, language, Lera Boroditsky, linguistics, Thad Snow, words

[A longer version of these thoughts was presented September 15 at the Quincy, Ill., Unitarian Church.]

People who hang around me long enough soon discover that I have a mad fondness for obscure, old-fashioned, and out-of-the way words. This is true for many people who love to write, but also true for others as well. There’s a special pleasure in finding a word that’s been lying around for hundreds of years, perhaps, just waiting for you to pick it up and put it in your pocket, like a coin on the sidewalk. A few years ago I picked up “petrichor,” which is the smell of earth after a rain, and ever since then I’ve been hollering out “petrichor” at every opportunity. A new old word is like a gift from the linguistic universe, a way of expressing something that previously seemed inexpressible. It’s a feeling similar to the experience I have whenever I get a new eyeglass prescription. Something that was blurry and indistinct, or perhaps even outside of my awareness, suddenly comes into sharp, precise existence. That’s what happens when you find a good, old, right word. The little dimple between your nose and your upper lip becomes a philtrum. And you’ve got a name for something previously unnamed. And what’s better is when you look up the origin of the word “philtrum,” and learn that it comes from a Greek word that means “love charm,” and now you’ll never look at a philtrum the same way again.

Other old-fashioned words are ones that you know quite well, but just never get the chance to use. Like steed, for example. Who wouldn’t love to be able to use steed now and then? But unless you’re willing to sound a little ridiculous,  the opportunity doesn’t arise, even if you do ride horses. But it’s a good word to have around. Still others are words that we might want to possess just because they’re so aesthetically pleasing. When you’re driving past a cornfield at sunset and see a flock of blackbirds or starlings all moving in unison, as if the entire flock is a single organism controlled by one brain, the word for that phenomenon is murmuration. I’ll probably never get to use murmuration in the wild, but I’m glad to know it’s there. Likewise with sillion, which is the name for the little furrow you make with a plow in preparation for planting seeds.

Old words reflect older ways of thinking, and thus they are a glimpse into history. I am struck by how many of our commonplace expressions and idioms have their origin from either agriculture or seafaring, two occupations that the great majority of Americans today have little or no knowledge of. When we talk about feeling in the doldrums, for example, we’re likely to forget that the Doldrums is an old word for an actual geographical location notorious for its lack of wind, known technically as the intertropical covergence zone. In the age of sail, getting caught in the Doldrums meant an extended period of forced idleness, debilitation, and inactivity that was not only tedious, but could even be fatal if your ship’s food stocks ran out. And who but the most dedicated farmers among us will recall that if you sow your wild oats, you’re likely to get a poor harvest, or none at all, and that you’re better off sowing those boring old tame, domesticated, tried-and-true oats. And what’s so bad about it when your chickens come home to roost? Nothing, it might seem, until you think about it in the original context of the metaphor. The original meaning of the phrase was that whatever you send out into the world will always come back to haunt you. In fact, the original expression was that curses are like chickens, in that they always come home to roost. As we might say today, karma’s gonna get you. So when I see an old-fashioned word, and understand where it came from, I am in a real sense looking back in time.

The other side of this observation is that some old-fashioned words deserve the obscurity they’ve been cast into, for they represent a way of thinking that we have thankfully outgrown. I’ve been reading a book lately called “From Missouri: An American Farmer Looks Back,” by a man named Thad Snow. Thad Snow was a farmer in the Bootheel during the first half of the twentieth century; he bought land near Charleston in 1910 and farmed it for more than forty years. Now Thad Snow was a true radical, one of those classic curmudgeonly Midwestern freethinkers who popped up from time to time during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His most famous moment occurred in January 1939, when he partnered with a sharecroppers’ activist named Owen Whitfield to support a widespread sharecroppers’ sit-in across southeast Missouri after many of them had been evicted by their landowners. He was the only major landowner to support the sit-in, and he was branded a traitor to his class by the other large farmers, who fancied themselves to be a plantation aristocracy of sorts. But in his memoir, written in 1954, he repeatedly refers to Owen Whitfield, his colleague in the sit-in, as a “darky.” Even given Snow’s penchant for making provocative remarks, which seems irrestible to him, this use of language that was out of date and offensive – even back then – makes me think less of him, and to reconsider his stance on behalf of the sharecroppers. Maybe he wasn’t acting out of principle, but just out of foolish contrariness. His language reveals more about his thinking than perhaps he had intended.

And that’s where I am headed with my thoughts on old-fashioned words. In linguistics, there’s a famous and rather controversial concept called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it boils down to this: Our language shapes our thinking. In greater detail, the hypothesis makes the case that all languages focus on certain aspects of life, and the difference in those focuses leads to differences in our thinking. It’s a more scientific version of the old “Eskimos have forty words for snow” idea. If we have the words to express an idea, it will get expressed; if we do not have the words, it likely will not. Linguists have studied the many variations in languages around the world, such as languages that do not have “count nouns” (such as one, two, three, and so forth) and languages that use cardinal directions instead of concepts such as left and right. As you might imagine, the speakers of these languages possess some interesting capabilities that English speakers lack, and lack some capabilities that English speakers own without even being aware that they do. To illustrate that point, linguist Lera Boroditsky points out that although speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre, an aboriginal language from Western Australia, do not have what we think of as the basic concept of left and right, they do have a remarkably precise sense of orientation to their landscape. Even a small Kuuk Thaayorre child is able to point north-northwest at any moment, while we advanced Americans would need to get out our phones and hope for the best. The inherent limitations and biases of language are the subject of Suzette Haden Elgin’s science fiction novel series Native Tongue. In this dystopian series, set in the 22nd century, women have been stripped of their civil rights, and a group of female linguists create a language for women as an act of resistance. In this language, called Laadan, there are distinctively separate words for a range of female experiences. For example, there’s a word for being pregnant, a separate word for being pregnant for the first time, and another for being pregnant joyfully.

The words we possess shape the thoughts we can express. If we acquire, and habitually use, the language of violence and exclusion, we enable violent and exclusionary thinking. And the opposite is also true: acquiring and using language of appreciation and beauty bends our minds in those directions. Ruth Dahl, the narrator and central character of Jane Hamilton’s wonderful novel The Book of Ruth, tells us how the verbal poverty of her upbringing has affected her:

We were the products of our limited vocabulary: we had no words for savory odors or the colors of the winter sky or the unexpected compulsion to sing. The language I had to speak to be understood is not the language of poetry or clear thinking.

One of the most repeatedly humbling experiences of my life is teaching literature to young people, because a lot of young people are not instinctively inclined toward literature in the way that earlier generations were. They’ve grown up accustomed to other modes of expression, and a lot of school work involves reading for main ideas and essential elements, not the kind of slow, savoring reading that literary study asks. So you have to re-teach them into different reading habits: don’t count the number of pages till the end, but stop and reflect every so often. Instead of reading for the general sense of a passage, read for every last bit of significance. And when you encounter an unfamiliar word, celebrate! It’s a gift. Needless to say, that approach doesn’t always go over in class. But once in a while, a student will pick up the spirit and discover the hidden revelations of old-fashioned words, the ferocious rigor of keelhaul or the sweet promise of bower.