we will all...

eventually find ourselves quoting things we've heard since birth. Those things that seem to be unique to our moms, or family expressions/sayings you never hear anywhere else. Always coming out of your mother's or grandmother's mouth - to the point that you will eventually find yourself saying: "according to my sainted grandmother....".

Or in my case, what I have come to refer to as 'choppyisms', those odd little sayings that I have heard all my life, but never from any one else's mouth. Named thusly because my mother's nickname was Choppy. Though that was not her given name, her dad started calling her Choppy when she was a child, and it stuck so well, most people in her adult life assumed it actually was her name. Never knowing that it was anything else, until she showed up at the courthouse on voting day, working as a polling official. She was required to wear a name tag, with her 'legal' name, and then they all wondered why she was wearing a name that wasn't her name!

The one that immediately comes to mind is 'whoppy-jawed'. It seems to refer to something that is not quite right. As a porch on an old house that is coming apart, leaning precariously, dangerously loose. Or a car you see going down the road that has obviously been wrecked, and appears to have had major damage to the body, to the point that it does not seem to drive straight: the frame is bent so that the front and back wheels are not in alignment. There are other expressions that are specific to my mom... and I will mention them when they come to mind.

I can't think of any others I heard from my mom, but I can clearly remember her quoting her mother-in-law, my grandmother. She thoroughly enjoyed commenting, when odd weather would occur, anything extreme, or the least abnormal: "we're living in the last days". That is, of course, true. And has been for hundreds of years.

Other grandmother loved to remind me that "you do the best you can, and the angels in heaven can't do any better". Which I assume is meant to inspire us all to take our efforts up a notch, and aspire to improve our daily efforts.  Another is 'take it and say Thank You' that she would pull out and use on me when she was trying to be generous and I was making my best effort to decline her generosity.

This started when F. called me today, from her work place, to report she had seen someone with a T shirt on that make her laugh. So she had to call me, knowing I would laugh too. I asked her to catch the girl in the laugh-able shirt and take a picture. To print here, after I wrote a blog about how we all eventually start sounding like our mothers...