The Whole 10 Yards

 

Warning: the following essay contains profanity. Reader discretion is advised.

It's possible my family are not among the most attentive listeners.  I can tell because we have a tendency to re-construe clichés – a practice both embarrassing and more fun than it sounds.  I started collecting them around the time my mother said we were going down the tubes in a hand-basket, which seems like it would be a fun ride at a Six Flags park.  

Because the originals came from my mother and her sister, my cousins and I came to call them Momisms, but truthfully the entire clan produces them.  There’s no sense feeling superior when I say things out loud to myself like “why mot as nell” which, after some reflection, I determined was a mixture of “why not” and “might as well”. 

I know these crazy phrases pre-date the hand-basket ride, because I grew up thinking “bite your nose to spite your face” was something other people said.  Granted, I was puzzled about how one might bite one’s own nose, but I had never heard “cut off your nose to spite your face”, so I just shrugged and moved on.   Those are the worse kinds of Momisms – the ones you don’t recognize until after you’ve repeated them to people who can only be thinking worse of you for it.  Some of them may actually be more useful than the original; “a rash and a shit” certainly sounds more uncomfortable than just a ration of shit.  And if more football fans knew the origin of “the whole nine yards” (sewing of some sort, I’m led to understand), we wouldn’t need to go the whole 10 yards to explain it.

There’s an ongoing debate whether “smoking the drapes” is something actual people say, or just my family.  Smoking the drapes means you’re talking crazy, and inhaling what I can only hope are hemp curtains.  My parents are adamant about its wider use, but the inventors of gems such as “cleaning like a parrot all day” cannot be trusted.  I did, after all, spend most of my young life identifying “an underneath” as a piece of furniture (it’s a cabinet, usually occurring under a “draw” as we call drawers in Jersey).  I’d still be using the term if I my 3^rd grade homework hadn’t included drawing and labeling a floor plan of my bedroom. 

Indeed, I do still use the family term for speeding:  barrel-assing.  I can’t even form a mental picture of the activity, but who cares?  I think of it as a fond mixture of barreling and hauling ass.  Our house had a quarter of a mile-long stone driveway, which my grandfather had recently finished raking when he scolded my father “don’t come barrel-assing down the driveway and throw the stones all over; nobody’s gonna take your spot.”  Words to live by.

Some of the best – and most puzzling – Momisms are the result of two clichés combined.  “Happy as a clam in shit” is reasonably self-explanatory, though one wonders what became of the pig.  The same is true of “other fish on the horizon.”  My aunt produced “talking to the preacher” in lieu of “preaching to the choir” – a bit more of a stretch.  “Hanging over your head like a bad penny” didn’t make any sense to me, as I hadn’t heard that bad pennies keep popping up.  But I can understand the anxiety at looking up and seeing a penny with a menacing expression.  Honest Abe can be scary.

These pearls of idiocy are usually formulated when the speaker is flummoxed, which means getting my mother angry is a great way to collect them.  Mom threatened to throw my brother and me “out on the balls of your ass” if we didn’t behave.  I’ve also found myself “tough out of shit” on occasion, and have been told in a particularly heated exchange “stick THAT up your ass and smoke it”.  I decided against that advice.

In the heat of the moment, there were warnings (he who laughs last, laughs last) and exclamations (oh, for fuck’s fuck!) and orders (get the hell get out of here).  At least one of us was accused of being a “one-note wonder.”  In the years before we were old enough to drive, mom used to tell my brother to sit on his dick and pedal his balls to wherever he was begging to be taken.  And while this may not be a mangled cliché of any sort, I believe it has the potential to become one in certain circles. 

Sometimes we’re just missing the right word.  Where was the word “paraplegic” hiding when it came time to warn my cousin that he would “fall down and turn into a paralegal”?  Life in a law firm is awfully depressing.  At least if you choke, my family is fully trained to use the “hymen maneuver” on you.  Done correctly, the surprise alone could dislodge whatever’s caught in there.

My favorite Momism of all time was born the weekend of my cousin’s college graduation.  The extended family had gathered to go to dinner with The Girlfriend’s family.  I think Mom was trying to express that it was a red-letter day, or a banner week for both graduates.  Unfortunately she congratulated them, in presence of their future in-laws, on what was surely “a red boner weekend.” 

When do you suppose the statue of limitations is up on that crime?