Monday Musings & Muttering

I've been thinking about a few things--not one is worthy of an entire blog--so here they are, in no particular order ...

1. Even as a little boy--when I first learned what days of the week were, what a calendar was--I never really believed that Sunday was the first day of the week. I still don't.

2. Yesterday, part of a song lyric stuck in my head--"I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you." I could not remember any of the rest of it, but my portable recall machine (iPhone) quickly gave me the answer. The song: "I'll Be Seeing You." 1938. Myriads of artists--in several generations--have covered it. But here's Billie Holiday, 1944, the year I was born. ... LINK. (Lyrics at the bottom of the page.)

I was thinking of the song because near the end of the film RBG, which Joyce and I saw on Saturday night, we hear Ruth Bader Ginsburg read aloud, her voice breaking at the end, the farewell note from her dying husband. (They were married more than a half-century.) Final words. Wrenching and powerful.

3. Earlier this week I posted on Facebook a bit of doggerel I called "Peckerwood in the Neighborhood"--about a noisy, annoying woodpecker assailing houses near us (he has attacked us in previous springs). A former student posted that the word--near where he was living--meant a "redneck." I'd already done a little research on the word. See what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say (bottom of the page).

Oddly, my dad nicknamed our house in Hiram (11917 Garfield R.) "Peckerwood"--I'm sure because of the busy birds in the area.

4. On Saturday, I gave myself a paper cut (turning the pages of a writing tablet). A drop of blood. An ouch! A curse I will not repeat on a Family Site.

Pressure. The blood quickly stopped. The pain (sort of) went away. Every now and then I would do something that would invite the pain back--like knead bread on Sunday, etc.

And I was reminded of that film 36 Hours (I blogged about it last year), a film from 1964 with James Garner, Rod Taylor, Eva Marie Saint. Based on a story by ... Roald Dahl. It tells how the Nazis captured an American intelligence officer (Garner), drugged him, convinced him the war was over. What they were really trying to get him to do was to cough up the details of D-Day. When? Where?

Garner was buying it all (they had installed him in an "American" hospital), when he felt a paper cut he'd given himself the previous day on a finger--a cut the Nazi doctors had not seen. And their plan unraveled ...

Well, I had no such exciting time ... but I did remember that movie again! (Link to film trailer.) I see the entire film is now on YouTube. It's fun to watch.

“I'll Be Seeing You”

I'll be seeing you

In all the old familiar places

That this heart of mine embraces

All day and through

In that small cafe

The park across the way

The children's carousel

The chestnut trees

The wishing well

I'll be seeing you

In every lovely summer's day

In everything that's light and gay

I'll always think of you that way

I'll find you in the morning sun

And when the night is new

I'll be looking at the moon

But I'll be seeing you

I'll be seeing you

In every lovely summer's day

In everything that's light and gay

I'll always think of you that way

I'll find you in the morning sun

And when the night is new

I'll be looking at the moon

But I'll be seeing you

Songwriters: Irving Kahal / Sammy Fain

I'll Be Seeing You lyrics © BMG Rights Management US, LLC

peckerwood, n. and adj.

Forms:  18– peckerwood, 19– peckahwood, 19– peckawood.

Frequency (in current use): 

Etymology: < woodpecker n., with reversal of the two elements. With sense A. 2 ... (Show More)

U.S. regional (chiefly south. and south Midland).

 A. n. 1. A woodpecker.

[1835   in Daily Home (Talladega, Ala.) (1910) 28 Feb. 2/2   The mouth of Peckerwood creek.]

1859   J. R. Bartlett Dict. Americanisms (ed. 2) 314   Peckerwood, Western for Woodpecker.

1893   H. A. Shands Some Peculiarities Speech Mississippi 49   Peckerwood, woodpecker. Bartlett says that this word is Western. It is also heard very frequently in Mississippi, as in Tennessee.

1909   F. B. Calhoun Miss Minerva 140   A big, red-headed peckerwood.

1935   Z. N. Hurston Mules & Men i. vi. 137   Ah wasn't gointer kill no ole tough peckerwood for you to eat, baby.

1947   J. H. Brown Outdoors Unlimited 76   Watching the jays and peckerwoods and listening to the distant shrillings of a hawk.

1968   Harper's Mag. Sept. 61/1   I even liked what the kids at Tuskegee Institute called ‘those crazy li'l ol' peckerwoods’.

2. slang (esp. in African-American usage). depreciative. A white person, esp. a white person regarded as poor, rustic, or unsophisticated; = peck n.4

[1859   Southern Lit. Messenger May 398/2   You must be ixtreemly keerful uv yoself, my deare. I shall be back in a few days... To Mrs. Mozis Addums in rispect. Peckerwood Parrydice, near Kerdsvil, Buckingaim County, Va.]

1928   C. McKay Home to Harlem v. 46   What's the matter, buddy, the peckawoods them was doing you in?

1942   W. Faulkner Go down, Moses & Other Stories 255   Even a Delta peckerwood would look after even a draggle-tail better than that.

1967   C. Major in A. Chapman New Black Voices (1972) 299   How come so many Of us niggers Are dying over there In that white Man's war They say more of us Are dying Than them peckerwoods & it just Don't make sense.

1967   N.Y. Times 7 Sept. 42/4   When I tried to get into the black caucus, they said, ‘No peckerwoods allowed in here, Sonny.’

1974   E. Brawley Rap (1975) ii. xxiv. 374   And we done, peckerwood, we finished.

1995   High Country News 7 Aug. 13/3   Prisons..are often deep in peckerwood territory, where a black prison employee is going to feel about as welcome as a black escaped convict.

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 B. adj. Small, poor, inferior; (also) of, relating to, or characteristic of the (poor white) population of the Southern states of America.

1866   C. H. Smith Bill Arp, so Called 95   If it didn't rain any more and the entire crop was prudently gathered, he might probably make a peck to the acre of peckerwood nubbins.

1946   Newsweek 15 Apr. 68/1   Conditions encourage not the efficient experienced producers but the peckerwood..operators.

1989   New Yorker 11 Dec. 136/3   The stern, melodramatic portrait of Earl's older brother Huey as a fantastic demagogue—a Peckerwood Caligula.

1992   U.S.A. Today (Nexis) 10 Apr. 7 d   The redneck, coonass, peckerwood South that you thought had been eaten up by the developers of Sunbelt suburbs.

2003   Austral. Financial Rev. (Nexis) 5 Aug. 64   A glib Democrat with a peckerwood accent and no plans for raising taxes has a better chance than a north-eastern stiff.