Like a pig looking at a wristwatch

I finished this painting last night. I have been working on it for about a year -- but most of that time was spent trying to imagine how the main character, the pig, would look.  He had to have just the right amount of incredulity.  Spent some time staring in the mirror.

I met a gentleman named Evans Wroten around 2001.  Evans is an old-school southern gentleman in pretty much every sense of that word.  He is intensely smart, thoughtful, and speaks with just a touch of a North Carolina drawl.  He has mastered something I can only aspire to: seasoning everyday prose with folksy aphorisms and metaphors.  The title of this painting "Like a pig looking at a wristwatch," comes from Evans.  It is exactly the kind of folksy, idiomatic snatch of language I love.

Every geographic has it's worn-out idioms.  But when dropped casually in the ears of a fresh audience, idioms become reborn.  "At the risk of telling my grandmother how to suck eggs," is a class example from Britain.  Any child of school age in Britain knows what that knows.  My friend Sagar has been teaching me "Bandar kya jaane adrak ka swad?" (Hindi, literally "what would a monkey know of the taste of ginger?" -- but implies someone is naive and too inexperienced to form an opinion).  And in the US, "that fellow is dumb as a sack of claw-hammers," is a good example.  Each of these attracts almost no attention in their homeland.  But, these seaonings evoke chuckles and vivid mental images when applied to fresh meat.

By contrast, I don't mean euphemisms.  "Bless his heart," is a euphemism in the South.  It sounds innocuous.  It means "that person is an idiot."  For example, "just look at that fellow's truck buried to the running boards in the swamp, bless his heart."  Also, by contrast, I don't mean a contraction.  "Y'all" is a common bit of southern spice, short for "You All," which literally refers a specific person.  Y'all would hear y'all everywhere in the South.  But as you go east toward Georgia, you start to hear the plural form: "All Y'All."  For example, "Are all y'all going to the fair with your pigs?"  That refers the interrogatory to the implied group of more than one person.  Mark Fetherolf, who appears frequently in my posts from time as inspiration or in attribution due to his very large brain, points out that is is only North Carolina where the plural possessive surfaces: "All y'all's."  For example "Are those all y'all's pigs?"  But contractions and euphemisms have limited impact in speech.

Evans uses contractions, and has plenty euphemisms, but his aphorisms are the ones I collect -- the ones that admit no doubt about interpretation.  For the larger part of my life, I have felt like a pig looking at a wristwatch.  That is, I observe, note, and can recognize things in my environment.  But extracting personal meaning and benefit often takes a long time, and (more often than not) requires somebody to jump-start my understanding.

"That fellow is tighter than Dick's hatband," is another I attribute to Evans.  I say "attribute" for these because I first noted them when I heard them from Evans; I am certain he didn't create them, but, instead, heard them from someone else.  His genius is the ability to weave them into his speech in a manner that appears effortless.

Before there was Twitter and hash-tags, there were aphorisms.  Technology like Twitter is merely catching up to something linguists have been doing since the dawn of language: highlighting pithy remarks, and using them as an organizing principle.  I'm glad the technology is catching up.  And I'm grateful to Evans for spicing up my vocabulary.