Talking Southern No. 93 : Reading a Spirit Level

     Three weeks ago, we talked about the various levels of the word, “mad.”   One of those levels was the “different drumbeat” kind of mad – someone who marches to such a different beat that more behaviorally-centrist folks seem to regard them as people who are two or three French fries short of a biggie-sized combo.   This condition is considerably less than full-blown “nuts,” but it’s a notch or two away from eccentric, which is probably the closest to normal.

     And Lord knows, most Southerners are eccentric.  Your compiler and his wife have a dish towel in their kitchen which reads, “You don’t have to drive me crazy.  I’m already within walking distance.”   That’s just general eccentricity, which is cherished in the South.  As has oft been said in this day of memes and GIFs, “We in the South don’t hide eccentricity; we invite it to sit on the front porch and enjoy a cocktail.”

      There are folks that don’t have enough sense to pound sand in a rat hole, as well as those who don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain. (Your compiler’s late father used to say of folks he thought really lacked judgment, “He doesn’t have enough sense to come in out of a shower of crow bars.”)  So the scale which runs from “Normal” on one side to “Stark-Raving Crazy” on the other, has a good bit of wiggle room between those two extremes.  Thanks be to God for that, for most of us travel up and down the scale fairly regularly – sometimes being so close to normal that no one can see the difference, and at others being somewhat down the scale from there.

     Your compiler smiles when he remembers his late mother, who would occasionally accuse folks (including her own children in extreme lapses of judgment) of being so lacking in good sense that “if you put his brain in a jaybird, it’d fly backwards.”  She didn’t always think that about her own offspring, but each of us was guilty of it from time to time.

     Your compiler also smiles to remember Marvin Murphy (1935-2013), a joyful man who taught him in 8^th Grade Social Studies at Tucker High School in the 1976-77 school year, and who was rumored to have been the Dancing Bear on Captain Kangaroo. Mr. Murphy would routinely refer to one or another of his students – with obvious affection one could hear in his tone and see in his eyes – as a “mole-headed, bird-brained, flea-bitten moose” or as a “twinkle-toed troglodyte.”

     So one can comment on someone’s sense, judgement, or even sophistication (or lack thereof) with any number of terms, as we have seen.  But perhaps your compiler’s two favorite phrases – one used when someone is off-the-charts slow, and the other when one is just a tad off center.   The first is, “She doesn’t have the sense God promised a water bug!”  One is left thinking, “That poor girl’s just about hopeless”.  (There’s a similar phrase which the compiler often uses about himself when he is feeling particularly distracted.   “My attention span is about like that of a water bug on a hot rock.”)

     The second phrase reminds him of that age-old carpenter’s tool, the spirit level.   “He’s about a half-bubble (or a quarter-bubble) off plumb,” one might hear.  Close to normal, but a hair off — which doesn’t sound all that bad till one considers another adage, which is that “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”