When I was about five, I developed an unfortunate habit of repeating the same word over and over again. I’d hear someone say “glowering” or “diesel” and the sound would appeal to me, so I’d say it to myself again and again as I went about my business. At the time, my business was playing in the yard and at my parent’s feet, so they got mighty tired of my little habit. One day, as I played near my mother’s rocker, I started to repeat the latest word to tickle my fancy: trollop.
I probably thought that it was a sea creature or a method of transportation, but whatever it was, I liked the way it sounded. My mother, however, did not. She picked me up by the shirt, put me over her knee and paddled me. Then she told me that she never wanted to hear me say that word again and sent me to my room, where I spent a few minutes with the large dictionary that I kept under my bed for just such exigencies as this. I learned a lot that day, although much of it went over my head until later.
Do we even have trollops anymore? How about buffleheads, knuckleheads and dunderheads? Floozies, fleabags and flibbertigibbets? Back in the 50′s and 60′s when I grew up, all of these terms were pretty common and so was scaring kids into behaving.But what term do modern mothers use to describe what people will think of their daughter, if she strays from the path of virtue by shaving her legs too soon, wearing her dresses too tight or wearing lipstick before she should? (Of course, nowadays, the age for all that is probably as soon as the kid is dry through the night, but still.)
If boys don’t play “fast and loose” with girls anymore, what do they do? “Hooking up” just isn’t the same thing, because the girls are playing fast and loose too. Juvenile detention center just doesn’t have the same ring as “bad boy” or “bad girl” school used to when my mother predicted that I’d end up there for sassing her. Bankruptcy laws and Ronald Reagan just about did away with poorhouses and madhouses, so they’re no longer destinations to threaten your offspring with.
Telling your kid she’d end up in the poorhouse if she kept spending her allowance on Almond Joys was a real threat to a kid who read Dickens like I did, believe me. Then I saw The Snake Pit and saw what happened to women who weren’t content to just be wives and I really got worried. I wanted to be a writer and I’d read about what happened to the Fitzgerald’s, Poe, Sylvia Plath, Hemingway and many others. Ending up in a madhouse wasn’t just a hollow threat when my mother held it over my head in order to get me to stop watching horror movies which would give me nightmares and drive me insane, according to her. Nowadays, 3 yr olds watch Jurassic Park and cheer for the velociraptors.
So far, I haven’t come to a bad end, although some people would say I’m working on it what with being a home schooling parent and all. I guess this is what comes of buying Almond Joys instead of putting my quarters into my piggy bank, and reading Mad Magazine and watching Rocky and Bullwinkle instead of learning Latin and Algebra.
Mind you, I’ve found a lot more use for what I learned from the former two than from the latter. Who could read Spy vs. Spy and not see the stupidity of the Cold War, for instance? Latin and algebra I can figure out with a dictionary and a calculator, although I rarely need to, but learning to see through propaganda and hypocrisy is much more useful. That’s why I was glad the other day when my daughter, who was supposed to be cleaning her room, sat down with her brother’s latest Mad magazine and started chortling. I was beginning to think that I’d have to threaten her with growing up to be a Republican or a Wal Mart greeter to get her to read a good book.
Lill Hawkins lives in Maine and writes about family life, home education and being a WAHM at http://hawkhillacres.blogspot.com . Get the News From Hawkhill Acres: A mostly humorous look at home schooling, writing and being a WAHM, whose mantra is “I’m a willow; I can bend.”
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