Country Humor

Words a plenty

by Mitch Jayne

Whatever state America finds itself in, I can guarantee that the Missouri Ozarks has a word for it. We have been through the same changes of weather, politics, war, economy, good and bad times as everybody else in the country, but we always manage to put things in perspective and find words to fit the occasion.aragraph

The language we use to do this, however, often skews listeners. An example being a country storekeeper who was heard to say, “They claim that’s a mean dog, but he’s never offered to bite me.” Only a patient Ozarker would mix “offered to” with “tried to.”

Among other Ozark expressions that gentle-down other Missourian’s speech is “odd-turned” for strange, which, when applied to people, sounds like describing someone shaped on a turning lathe. What’s fun about that is that “odd-turned” doesn’t refer to shape but mental status, as in “That Ross Perot was the oddest-turned feller I ever saw run for office.”

We have a good time down here, making old words still work for us—words other people put out to pasture years ago—and we make them mean what we want them to. A person can get “torn up something wonderful” in a car wreck, and “scratched up marvelous in a blackberry patch.”

We turn “mind to” into “care to,” which can be startling when you hear someone say, “I wouldn’t care to have some more of them white beans,” while he’s heaping his bowl. We also use “about” any way we want to, from “pretty near” to “taking a turn” at. We say to a visitor, “Dad’s somewhere about” and we “take a lick about” sharing dish washing or wood chopping (neither of which requires using your tongue).

Nothing says Ozarks as well as the local descriptions of the economy we’re going through right now. Lean times bring out the best in our language: we have “perished” it out before and watched our income “fall all to staves” to where “a person didn’t have shiftin’ clothes or a bone to throw the dogs.”

An old friend once described the last time this happened in the Great Depression, when language was the only thing we had in plenty.

“My dad had held onto a ten-dollar bill,” he told me, “and he had it shrined in a jar where we kids could reverence it. It looked big as a bed blanket to us, them days.

“Well, an old feller Dad knew come to stay the night and took that bill when he left out. I remember Dad was easy goin’ about the ten-dollar bill. He said, ‘Boys, h’it ain’t about the money, maybe he needed it worse than us, poor feller. But that sorry rogue has also took my shoes so I can’t chase his worthless carcass down and stomp it to hell and gone!’”

See, we never need answers to the times we’re going through as much as we need a good way to describe them to our children.

Infrastructure I can believe in

by Jack S. Bray

Getting grain from where it’s grown to where it’s used has always been a challenge. In recent years, the challenge deepens as more varieties of grain and oilseeds are grown in more places and the end-use products have multiplied. Huge crops the past 2 years have compounded the transportation problem.

“Actually, the transportation system has held up very well during these past two big harvests,” said Bill Dunn, MFA director of transportation. “ This is helped by the fact that more producers now are storing grain on the farm, which reduces the harvest-time glut. Also, in 2008, wet weather spread planting over a wider season, which meant that harvest was spread over a longer period. Rail and truck movement has been pretty orderly—by and large, we’re in good shape.”

Rivers are a different matter. Thanks largely to the Corps of Engineers’ less-than-effective management, barge traffic is essentially dead on the Missouri River. On the Illinois and upper Mississippi Rivers, construction projects have been let, but there’s still little or no work underway to update the aging locks and dams on those streams. That’s unfortunate. River transportation is the lowest-cost way to move bulk goods.

Consider these comparisons of capacity:

• 15-barge tow 790,000 bu.
• One barge 52,500 bu.
• 100-car unit train 400,000 bu.
• One rail hopper car 4,000 bu.
• One semi-trailer 910 bu.

The comparison is even starker when you consider fuel economy. A river barge can haul a ton of freight 520 miles on one gallon of fuel. A railroad uses a gallon of fuel to move a ton of freight 385 miles. And trucks can move a ton of freight only about 60 miles on one gallon of fuel.

To be fair about it, though, trucks have often filled the gaps as rail and barge transportation faltered. They’ve had to. And trucks have performed admirably, albeit at greater cost both in terms of dollars and gallons of fuel.

The Obama administration has hit the ground in Washington flinging money with both hands at the worst economic crisis to hit the U. S. in several generations. And they have budgeted a big bale of taxpayer cash to improve the transportation infrastructure, especially highways and bridges—which is sorely needed.

I’m the last person to give the President advice on how to spend our money. But while he’s at it, I hope President Obama is chipping off a good chunk of change to rehabilitate our inland waterways. That would generate jobs and build a long-term transportation system that would help get more mileage out of both money and oil. And while he’s looking in that direction, he might consider making more money available for the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing program, the federal agency that makes low-interest loans and loan guarantees to help finance improvements in railroad infrastructure.

If the President happens to read this and wants other ideas on the best ways to spend our (and our grandchildren’s) money, I hope he will give me a call. I have a few more notions that I would like to share with him.

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