Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Jan. 23, 2012

Fried green Alabamer Grammar



Editor's note: Tim Sanders is on vacation this week. This column first appeared in the Jan. 31, 2011 edition of The Post.

Words are important. Just before he died in October of 1745, Irish author Jonathan Swift lifted his head from his pillow and said: “Mmmmmf!” Then an attendant installed his teeth and he continued: “Somebody write this down: You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Swift also made a couple other dying pronouncements about not making bowler hats out of taco shells and not making sweaters out of wet cat fur, but those adages never caught on due to the fact that no one in Ireland had ever seen a taco shell, and everyone thought sweaters were people who perspired a lot.

Regardless, since Swift’s silk purse remark was first published in the Dublin Daily Ballyhoo and Blather, the sow’s ear industry has never recovered. There is a lesson there, somewhere.

In the meantime, here are some helpful answers to some bothersome grammar questions:


Q: What does “as it were” mean?

A: “As it were” is the past tense of the popular phrase “as it are.”


Q: I still don’t understand. Can you use it in a sentence?

A: Certainly. Here are both tenses:

PAST TENSE: “I think this here bowl of salmon has went bad, as it were left out here on the porch all night.”

PRESENT TENSE: “That there bowl of salmon smells bad as it are ‘Mr. Tasty Tuna, Blue Cheese and Spleen’ cat food, and you oughtn’t to eat no more of it, Lester!”


Q: My wife’s brother Randall is always washing his hands. Ever time he touches a doorknob or turns on a light or pets a dog or even looks at a cat he runs to the sink and washes his hands. We was watching our favorite Wheel of Fortune DVD last night and after he made us pause it so he could run back and forth to the sink nineteen or twenty times I tole him I seen a case like his on Dr. Phil and they said he was a compressive repulsive. Well Randall he said he weren’t no such thing and balled up his fist and hit me in the nose. Then he run to the kitchen and washed his hands, grabbed a clean dish towel out of the drawer and run back to his room which is across the hall from Maureen’s cousin Lisa’s room which moved into our mobile home the last time her husband run off. Maureen she said ever since we was married I had embarrassed her to death and if I couldn’t do no better than that with English, maybe I ort to try learning Mexican. What did I say wrong?

A: Your first mistake was probably “I do.”


Q: What is “deja vu”?

A: Didn’t you ask me this very same question once before? And won’t your response be “CERTAINLY NOT!”?


Q: CERTAINLY NOT!

A: Aha, just as I thought!


Q: Okay then, Mr. Smarty pants, if we’ve been through all this before, what will my next question be?

A: After I explain that “deja vu” is the feeling that you’ve already experienced the very same thing you are currently experiencing, you will ask if I’ve ever experienced “deja vu.”


Q: And your answer will be?

A: My answer will be that yes, I have. Just a few weeks ago I was preparing my January 31, 2011 column for the following week, and–”


Q: WAIT! Isn’t this the January 31, 2011 column?

A: Oh my Lord, it's happening again! Let’s move on to the next question, which I happen to know will have nothing to do with “deja vu.”


Q: In western movies, why do the cowboys always measure their herds by the head, as in: “We’ve got 500 head of longhorns grazing out there, Kirby.”?

A: Originally they measured everything, including land, lumber, and cattle, by the foot. But measuring cattle by the foot always required that extra step of dividing by four to determine exactly how many cows any given rancher had, so in the late 1880s the “head count” was introduced.


Q: I seen a photo on the Internet of a cow borned in either Germany or Nebraska or one of them foreign countries, I forget which, and it had two heads. How would you count that one?

A: If you were a cattle buyer, you’d count it as half a cow because it was defective. If you were selling cattle, you’d count it as two premium grade cows. And if you were a Department of Fish and Wildlife bureaucrat, you’d classify it as an endangered species, search for a two-headed bull for it to mate with, and declare the rancher’s property, at least the portion under irrigation, as protected wetlands.


Q: Yesterday I read that a man who robbed three Dallas banks was still at large in Texas. Why did they say he was “at large?”

A: Texas is a huge state. If he’d robbed three banks in Rhode Island, he’d only be “at small.”


Q: Can you use “et al” in a sentence?

A: No.


Q: Aw, c’mon!

A: All right then, let me think ... Aha! “Bob et the spinach and the pinto beans, et al.”


Q: Shouldn’t that be “etc?”

A: No. The “c” in “etc” stands for the collards which he et. Or didn’t et, as the case may be, as it were, per se, ad infinitum and so forth.


Q: Then how about “e.g.?”

A: Here in Alabama, we mainly eat our e.g. with a strip of bacon for breakfast.


This Wednesday is Groundhog Day, when millions of Americans from New Hampshire to New Mexico will watch intently as large rodents see their shadows, and then they scurry back into their holes for another six weeks of winter. Please remember that if I had phrased the last sentence more carefully, you’d know I meant that the groundhogs would scurry back into their holes, not the millions of Americans watching them, necessarily. But grammar is only a hobby with me, not a vocation. After all, you can’t make a silk purse out of a humor columnist.