Thursday, January 01, 2004

New Year's Eve was fun.... my first few hours of 2004 were spent at The Gold Rush. To those of you unfamiliar with the Gold Rush, I've often described it "like Cheers... but SCARY Cheers", because I always meet/converse with people from all walks of life (students, military folk, blue-collar, white-collar, no-collar, etc.) when I go, and it used to be extremely dive-y. However, they've done a lot of revamping/cleaning up in the past year, so it's really not scary at all anymore (I suppose that depends on your fear threshold, of course) ...yet still retains that come-as-you-are kind of feel, which is good.

I have to say, it was an extremely cost-efficient New Year's, as well. So, I'd now like to say thanks to that large party of people we hung out with, who, I think, took care of our bar tab. Or, if they didn't, then I'd like to apologize for putting drinks on their bar tab.

Today I went to an antiques auction. I didn't get anything, but it's always a highly entertaining experience. Furniture, art, and decor ranges from amazingly beautful, to horribly ugly, to just plain bizarre (I'm currently thinking of this one piece they had up several months ago, which was a large "lifelike" oil painting of a greyhound dog head on a silk corset-clad woman's body -- it was cool, but yet also scared the crap out of me). It's also a great place to people-watch, and the auctioneer is full of fun and interesting phrases, which I'm not sure are particular to him or if they're southern-isms but whatever the case, I like 'em. For example, when he wants to call up a new item, he always says "come on with it", emphasis on the "with". I've been saying that to myself all day: "Another page to fill out in this grant application, well come on with it!" Or this one furniture mover, when he needs to get by, always says "find a hole! find a hole!". Hee hee. Love it.

Thinking about this reminds me how I often have a problem distinguishing between just plain new-to-me phrases/word usage versus southern slang. For example, a recent vocab. acquisition is using the word "holler" to mean that you're calling someone, as in "I'll give you a holler" or "I'll holler at ya." I always associated the word holler with screaming, pain or anger... but now looking it up at m-w.com, I'm just totally confused because it can be used to mean "call" in the transitive sense.... huh? Ok, someone who has a good understanding of english needs to help me out here. Give me a holler.

Another thought: I really want to start compiling a list of all the vocabulary and phrases I've learned since I've lived in the south. Ooh, maybe even keep it in publically-accessible blog format. Now that would really crank my tractor.

Well, I'm going to get back to this grant I'm applying for from the American Heart Association... I was being pretty diligent until I got to the race information page and they won't let me pick more than one ethnicity, AND they don't have an "other" box, which pissed me off. Thus I turned to this. All their fault!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

eXTReMe Tracker
.... ----