Never Seen a Grit

Highfalutin: The theme of My Cousin Vinny is the clash of the familiar with the foreign. The New York Gambinis meet the Alabama Good-ole-boys in the Sac ‘o Suds and in the courtroom.

Regular American: My Cousin Vinny is hilarious. Like many classic comedies, this 1992 movie starring Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei has quite a camp following, and you can see lots of the scenes on YouTube.

 

One of the funniest is when Vinny (Pesci) meets a grit in the Alabama version of the greasy spoon.

 

 

 

Grits Recipes

I remembered this scene when I ran across a copy of food article featuring grits from a now defunct magazine written by the food writer Lydia Itoi. In it, grits meet Spain and China in two recipes, Striped Grits – Polenta Torta and Nancy’s Chinese Grits. To understate it, they are interesting. Itoi says she likes grits better than polenta, but the recipe pits the two directly against each other. It’s a good brunch dish for a crowd.

The Torta

For the Polenta:

1 ear fresh corn on the cob

2 cups water

½ teaspoon salt

½ cup quick-cooking polenta

For the Grits

2 cups water

½ teaspoon salt

½ cup quick-cooking hominy grits

2 oz. brie cheese, rind removed and cut into small cubes

Butter a 9-inch loaf pan. Wrap the ear of corn in plastic wrap and microwave on high for 1-1/2 minutes. Remove the wrap, hold the ear of corn vertically on a cutting board, and slice the kernels off with a sharp knife. Measure out ½ cup kernels.

Bring the water and salt to a boil and gradually stir in the polenta. Lower the heat to medium and continue cooking, stirring constantly, for 10 minutes or until polenta is very thick and starts pulling away from the sides of the saucepan. Remove from the heat and stir in the ½ cup corn kernels. Spread this mixture evenly in the bottom of the loaf pan and set aside.

Bring the water and salt to a boil and gradually stir in the grits. Lower the heat to low, cover and continue cooking, stirring frequently, for 10 minutes or until grits are very thick and creamy. Remove from the heat and stir in the cheese until it melts and is thoroughly combined. Spread this mixture over the polenta. Cover with plastic wrap and chill until firm, at least 2 hours.

Before serving, slice the torta into thick slices and spread them on an ovenproof serving dish. Broil for 10-12 minutes, or until the top turns lightly golden. Serve warm. Makes 6 servings.

Nancy’s Chinese Grits

3 cups water

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon grated fresh ginger

¾ cup quick-cooking grits

¼ cup chopped ham, imitation crabmeat, or fish balls

¼ cup peas or sliced snow peas

3 tablespoons chopped green onions or chives

Ground white or black pepper to taste

In a medium saucepan, bring the water, salt and grated ginger to a boil. Gradually stir in the grits, ham (or crabmeat or fish balls) and peas and cook according to package instructions. Remove from heat and stir in green onions. Season to taste with pepper and serve hot. Serves 4.

Now, regarding highfalutin or hifalutin or highfaluten or hifaluten:

Mainstream dictionaries agree that it means absurdly pompous or bombastic in style, pretentious, but they disagree on origins. It is very American, however.

The American Heritage dicltionlarly of The English Language, fourth edition, 2000, gives a regional note: “H.L. Mencken, in his famous book The American Language, mentions highfalutin as an example of the many native U.S. words coined during the 19^th-century period of vigorous growth. Although highfalutin is characteristic of American folk speech, it is not a true regionalism because it has always occurred in all regions of the country.”

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Humble Pie

Which makes you fatter? Lemon pie or humble pie.

I’ve had plenty of both. Humble pie is dessert after a meal of eating your own words. It’s the prize for being wrong.

Which is harder? Going on a diet or facing your wrongness? Both, I guess.

It’s now almost a year since our granddaughter Joanna Leigh came to live at our home, which was several months prior to being awarded legal custody. She was 17 months old. Since she had been living in our house with her mother, our daughter, for the better part of those 17 months, she felt secure and happy here, reducing the harshness of such a change. We didn’t see any signs of distress in her sleeping, eating, or other behavior, despite being separated from her mother, who was again being ruled by her drug addictions.

Joanna Leigh was on time with repeating words at about a year old, with “ba-ba,” “dog,” “go,” and the infamous “NO!” She began quickly referring to my husband as “Papa.” She was not yet calling me anything in particular, even though I had begun referring to myself as “Mama Jo,” my other granddaughter’s name for me. Then the process quickly went to two-word combinations, like “my yogurt,” “my color.” The “mine” phase took on a life of its own, which I chronicled in two Words and Language posts, June 10 and July 9. (See the categories in the right sidebars.)

Then suddenly, Whammo, Bam, Pow: the trickle had turned into a torrent. Joanna Leigh was suddenly in the throes of learning language at about 150 miles an hour. We were flabbergasted daily.

When she was not speaking English sentences, she was babbling some other language, Jabberwocky, maybe. For practice, I guess.

But she still wasn’t really calling me anything. There were times when I thought she might be trying to call me “mama,” which, as it turns out, was feeding my misconceptions.

How toddlers begin using language is also humbling. According to Steven Pinker in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, at about 18 months, toddlers’ language production “takes off.” Pinker says that language development goes from babbling at about eight months to “All Hell Breaks Loose” at this stage.

Vocabulary growth jumps to the new-word-every-two-hours minimum rate that the child will maintain through adolescence. And syntax begins, with string of the minimum length that allows it.

He also says that there is more going on in children’s minds than is revealed by what comes out of their mouths.

When children do put words together, the words seem to meet up with a bottleneck at the output end. Children’s two-and-three-word utterances look like samples drawn from longer potential sentences expressing a complete and more complicated idea.

My misconception began with believing I could protect Joanna Leigh from the hurt that would come with being separated from or even losing her mother.

Then I added to that the belief that I could be an adequate mother figure as her memory of her own mother began to change or even fade.

I was wrong on both counts.

In late April and early May, Joanna Leigh began seeing her mother periodically, while she was in a Birmingham treatment/housing facility for women. After several trips to the facility, Joanna Leigh woke up in the night crying for her “mommy.” The blow was hard and complete. I felt as if a tornado had spun out of nowhere, picked me up, and thrown me out into the backyard. I was afraid, sorrowful, distressed, and heartbroken for her.

It was a hard way to learn that I could not keep Joanna Leigh from hurt and to discover that she wasn’t calling me or thinking of me as “mama” or a mommy substitute. I realized she needed to see her mother.

She held the concepts in her mind, but she didn’t yet have the language to let them out. She needed her mommy and she needed me, Papa, and her home. It took language.

Right now, she sees her mother; it may or may not last. She thinks of this house, Mama Jo, Papa, Maggie, Patty, her toys, her stuffed friends in her room, all of it, as Home. This Home helps her feel secure, happy, and confident. When or if the time comes for hurt, all we can do is be here.

Language is humbling. It’s so built into us that we simply take it for granted.

Being so wrong about something so important to a child is humbling.

So I eat the Humble Pie. I need to find a way to stay off the lemon pie.

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Argentine Nights: What You Will

 

Clown: “A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!”

Viola (disguised): “Nay, that’s certain. They that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton.

Twelfth Night, 3.1.11-115

A segment of the movie version of Twelfth Night

Wanton Words

Aren’t words great? You can do so much with them. You can find out so much about other people through them. You don’t have as many as you might think, so when all else fails, you can just make them up.

Words are a lot like the large and small rocks, stones, and pebbles you find along hilly paths or mountain trails, around lakes, on beaches. I picked up some beautiful rocks from the Homer Spit in Alaska. I put some in my suitcase to bring home and then had to get a porter to help me with my luggage.

Words can make you feel dressed for the Ball or bare you down to your birthday suit. Like they did recently to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. Words ultimately will out you along with the truth. 

 

Naked Words

The reason for the dominance of English in the world is the size of its vocabulary. Most estimates, including those in The Story of English, say that German contains 185,000 words and French a mere 100,000 . On June 10, the English language embraced its one-millionth “word.” A controversy ensued, which tells me that you can create a controversy out of anything. Whether it was the 500,000^th or the millionth, English still does the best job at revealing our minds.

The problem I have with this one-millionth word is that first, it’s not a word, and second, you can’t use it in Scrabble. It’s “Web 2.0.” Isn’t it a word plus some numbers? Or am I just out of the loop?

English has so many words because speakers have been not just willing, but eager, to take them in from everywhere and make them our own. And then make them up as needed.

Make-believe

A couple of words I made up a good while ago came to mind recently: refuctious and orificious.

Refuctious seemed just right to define my granddaughter’s “MINE” behavior I talked about in All Mine, All the Time MINE Parts I (June 10) and II (July 9). You can read those by clicking on Grandparents in the right column.

And orificious seemed just right when the Sanford scandal broke. “Officious” means overzealous, especially about petty stuff; self-important, intrusive, meddling. Mostly we know what “orifice” means.

Naked Truth

Those now-public love e-mails sent to Sanford’s Argentine squeeze are gagified (not a certified word yet but should be made the opposite of “beautified”):

You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that is so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light — but hey, that would be going into the sexual details we spoke of at the steakhouse at dinner — and unlike you I would never do that!

Sanford tries to say he loves her “being,” what he calls her rare attribute. “Above all else I love that inner beauty about you.” Bunk. I think “orificious” best suits what suits him.

As for outing himself, he is quoted as saying something like “I’m trying to fall in love with my wife again.” He’s outed as wanton as far as I’m concerned.

Languinerds in Love

Most languinerds agree that Shakespeare made up or re-introduced some 3,000 words into English. They also agree that his vocabulary totals between 25,000 and 29,000 words, depending on how you count different forms of the same word. Amazingly, this number is almost twice what the average college graduate has (12,000-15,000) and four or five times what the average high school graduate has (5,000-7,000).

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night alone (from which the introductory quote is taken), according to Book Scraper, the Bard used ten words he didn’t use in any of his other works. He used 19,710 words to tell this story.

So, here’s the score:

English language 1,000,000

Mark Sanford 0

 

The Story of English, third edition, is available at on-line book sellers.

 

 

 

 

 

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was made into a movie and is available on DVD. It is also on YouTube in segments. See the first segment by clicking on the video above which opens the post.

 

 

 

 

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All Mine, All the Time, MINE – Part II

 

It’s gotten more refuctious. Yes, refuctious – one of the most appropriate words I’ve ever made up. It will be the subject of a later post.

If you remember from the Part I post of June 10, I argued that “MINE!” is a more awful attribute of the Terrible Twos than is “NO!” Now I REALLY stand by that conclusion.

How can anything this cute behave so refuctiously?

After posting that essay, I started looking for information on the question of where the belief that everything is theirs could have come from. Then I mulled over the question of how they put the word “MINE” in front of everything they saw. If she were being brought up by Paris Hilton, I could understand it.

First, I looked in my trusty toddler book What to Expect: The Toddler Years by Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi E. Murkoff, and Sandee E. Hathaway. If you’ve been pregnant, you likely have What to Expect when You’re Pregnant and know about the What To Expect series.

In “The Twenty-Second Month,” the authors have a brief section on Generosity Turned Selfish in response to a question from the mother of a female toddler:

Your daughter, like most children in their second year, has suddenly realized [the concept of ownership.] . . . Now she has a new sense of self and of ownership (These are mine!”).

It’s important to recognize that the impulse to guard what is hers (and occasionally grab what she wants to be hers) reflects not selfishness but a developmental stage. . . A willingness to share with her playmates – at least part of the time – probably won’t be forthcoming for at least a year.”

A YEAR? A Whole YEAR???

I resorted to pulling out my old Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, the 40^th Anniversary Edition revised and updated for the 1980s. The copyright information says that Dr. Spock came out with his first book in 1945. Amazing. He essentially says the same thing: “If your child at 2 doesn’t give up her possessions, she is behaving normally. Amazingly refuctious.

So the answer to the first part of the question sounds like, “It’s a developmental thing.” As they begin to define their sense of self, everything revolves around them. It’s “theirs.” I guess Paris Hilton is still two.

Just the other day I, my husband, and our granddaughter Joanna Leigh, 25 months old, went on an outing to Piggly Wiggly. We needed thick, overnight diapers, bananas, pears, yogurt, flavored water (for her nighttime ba-ba, the subject of yet another post), cat food, and come to think of it, not much for us except a frozen pizza for that night’s supper. There was a time I wouldn’t have considered eating a grocery-store pizza for supper, but toddlers change lives, especially grandparent’s lives when they are parenting that toddler.

We were at the check-out when I realized I needed vacuum cleaner bags. “7-B,” said the clerk. So I high-tailed it to the back left part of the store. Looking, looking, looking. Suddenly I hear high-pitched wails from the front of the store.

“Why doesn’t that mother do something,” I said out loud to the cleaning supplies. No vacuum bags. Anywhere. Crying from the front. Suddenly it hit me. “That’s Joanna Leigh!”

The LOOK

I high-tail it back to the front, just as my husband and the baby were headed to the door. She had real tears in her eyes and was still crying.

“What on Earth?” I asked.

“You won’t believe it,” my husband replied. “When I got the yogurt out of the buggy to put on the scanner, she started screaming ‘MINE, my yogurt. Mine’.”

“NO. Say it’s not so.” I looked back at the check-out clerk. She met my eye, with a LOOK.

It WAS so. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to ALL the mothers out there that I have given LOOKS to when their kids were acting up in public, and believe me, there have been many.

I think I have found the answer to the second part of the question. You have things to do, and I’ll have to study this. I will explain it as best I can in Part III.

Meanwhile, you pronounce refuctious thusly: re-fuc΄-shus.

Photo by Emory Kimbrough

 

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All Mine, All the Time, MINE – Part I

Technorati Tags: language,toddlers,Terrible Twos,gardenias,Noam Chomsky,Reflections on Language,Universal Grammar,Steven Pinker,The Language Instinct

In any language it’s the same: C’est la MIENNE, Es ist MEINE, or in Japanese, or in Swahili, or Esperanto, or pig Latin -- it’s MINE. Always the emphasis is on MINE. It’s MINE. It’s MINE. It’s MINE.

Most people think “NO!” is the language of toddlers. I don’t believe it. “MINE, it’s MINE!” puts “NO!” in time out.

But what escapes me is where toddlers come up with the word “mine” in whatever their language is. Normal adults speaking any language don’t walk around saying “MINE” constantly. How do toddlers attach the word “MINE” to their egocentric, self-oriented, singular world? Then after that, where does the concept that EVERYTHING in the entire world is theirs come from? Adults also don’t go around saying, “THIS is yours, and THIS is yours and THIS is yours,” as they go for a walk in the park.

Maybe later they might say, “All this COULD be yours,” but that’s not the same thing.

Granted, the Terrible Twos are simply preview to the teenage horror to come, but this MINE business really becomes like vomitus.

My granddaughter and I were outside in the garden the other morning. I have about 20 gardenia bushes in the back, and when they are at their peak, the entire back yard smells of the sweet scent of gardenias. I thought, “Oh, this is a wonderful time to add ‘sweet-smelling flower’ to her repertoire.” HA.

I took her to see one of the bushes. I explained how the bloom’s scent is so heavenly. She started grabbing at the flowers. “Mine. MINE. MY sveet fower.”

Oh, yuk. That’s just IT.

My sister was here recently and was amused and horrified at this obsessive use of one word among millions. It became a running joke. We became more and more hysterical. “MY TV clicker.” “MY napkin.” “MY spilled wine.” “MY sponge.” “MY toothbrush.” “MY pillow.”

I was introduced in graduate school to Noam Chomsky’s theories about the predetermined nature of language structure in humans, transformational grammar, and other heady stuff. In his 1975 book Reflections on Language, he poses a hypothetical situation where a scientist is observing a child (maybe a two-year-old?) learning the English language. The scientist sees that the child has learned to form statements and questions like “the man is tall – is the man tall?” He then runs through a scientific method to arrive at the following conclusion about UG (Universal Grammar): “Linguistic theory, the theory of UG construed in the manner just outlined, is an innate property of the human mind.”

Oh, YIKES. But he didn’t hear Joanna Leigh saying, “The fower is sveet – is the fower sveet?”

No, she said “Mine. MINE. MY sveet fower.” And yanked it off the bush.

At the end of that chapter, Chomsky writes, “In the next two chapters I want to say something more about a few of these mental faculties and their interaction.” Well, I looked in the index and did not see “The Terrible Twos.” So not even Chomsky can answer MY question.

When MY sister was leaving, I said to her that when she got back to work on Monday, she could get things straight in the office by starting out with “MY file folders,” “MY cubicle,” “MY ad copy proof,” MY staff meeting,” and so on and on and on and on.

I’m going to go back and re-read MY copy of Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. Meanwhile, can anyone shed light on this troubling aspect of the human condition?

 

Photos by Alice Wilson, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. See her copyrighted work: http://www.alicewilsonphotography.com/

For recession watchers: Used copies of Chomsky’s Reflections on Language are available on Amazon.  Used copies of Pinker’s The Language Instinct are also available at Amazon. 

About Spittin’ Grits

_© Maggie Mae and Patty Cake napping. They are now five years older, but, like most women can be, continue to be very close friends. They are also close friends with our two-year-old granddaughter.

Spittin’ Grits_©, from Joanna Cravey Hutt, presents observations, beliefs, and information about topics including (but not limited to): Grits, Grandparents Parenting and Toddler Whisperings, Drug Addiction, Funny Bones, Politics, Reunions (I have been to a few), Southern Stuff, Travels, and Words and Language. Some lives turn out pretty much as expected. A lot of mine is not what the script called for. As I ad libbed my way through the surprises, amazements, shocks, disappointments, I learned some stuff, which inspired me to create Spittin’ Grits_©.

Why these subjects? I know grits and Southern stuff from having lived only in Alabama since 1961 when I entered The University of Alabama; my husband (of nearly 40 years) and I are raising our (now) six-year-old granddaughter because of our daughter’s nearly lifelong, intractable drug addictions; as a retired writer, editor, adjunct English instructor, and freelance writer, I have worked with words and language all of my professional life. Other topics reveal interests.

            Welcome to my thoughts and experiences. Some will be more personal than others, particularly those posts on drug addiction, which I have come to know because of my daughter’s addictions. Some will be informative, I hope, which contributes to my goal of sharing what I have learned. Some will just BE.

            Thank you for visiting. I hope you will return, comment, and tell others about Spittin Grits_©. Comments must be civil, short and to the point. Obscene, profane, abusive and off-topic comments will be deleted. Repeat offenders will be blocked. Thanks for abiding by these rules and for taking part. 

Spittin’ Grits is a registered trademark and is the sole property of Joanna C. Hutt. Copyright 2009, all rights reserved.