Culture-clash

[Jonathan Lighter]

It's starting to seem as if all successful communication occurs solely by
coincidence.

It's ironic.

JL

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 8:22 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Culture-clash
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>
> On an episode of The Peoples Court, a late-thirty-ish black woman is
> asked by the judge, a late-forty-ish white woman, to describe the
> injuries suffered by the former's son as a consequence of his having
> been shoved down a flight of stairs at school.
>
> She speaks:
>
> "Your honor, I looked at him and I saw that he had _hickies_ *all on his
> head*!"
>
> Judge Milian, rhetorically:
>
> "Well, I don't think the other boy gave him very many kisses, do you?"
>
> Black woman:
>
> Blank look. I.e., the question is totally void of content in the
> relevant context, hence unanswerable.
>
>
> For those who came in late, a while ago, I noted here that, though the
> word _hickey_ is present in the lexicon of BE, its meaning has nothing
> whatsoever to do with its meaning in WE. In BE,  a "hickey" is only a
> knot raised on someone's head as the consequence of a blow, having no
> reference whatsoever to kissing. In this case, the black woman was
> describing the knots (is that the right word?) on her son's head that
> hadresulted from his head having struck against the edges of the
> stairs during the course of his fall.
>
> Of course, the judge, thought that, for some who-knows-WTF-these-
> people-are-saying-it's-all-so-what's-the-word?-"hip" reason, the woman
> was colorfully, but obscurely, referring to the knots on her son's
> head as though they were the consequence of his having been *kissed*,
> in some jargonic sense, by the other boy.
>
> And, likewise, the black woman couldn't even guess at what answer the
> judge's rhetorical question might call for.
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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