After watching the Cubs :cubs: dispatch the Blue Jays 7-4 this afternoon, I flipped the television over to MASN to catch the end of the Orioles\/Pirates game.<\/p>\n
The Orioles had coughed up a couple of runs earlier in the game, had clawed back to 4-2, and then, moments after I switched the channel, I watched as Brian Roberts launched a two run homer into the left field bleachers to tie the game in the bottom of the 9th (with 2 outs, no less), giving Pirates closer Matt Capps his third blown save of the week.<\/p>\n
I explain all this as background.<\/p>\n
The game went into the tenth inning. And as it was a commercial break, I went upstairs.<\/p>\n
My grandmother stopped me. “Who’s the jackass talking?”<\/p>\n
“What?” I said, confused.<\/p>\n
“There’s some jackass talking.”<\/p>\n
“There’s no one talking.”<\/p>\n
“I hear him. You’re talking to some jackass about me.”<\/p>\n
“I’m watching television.”<\/p>\n
She scowled at me, probably thinking that I was hiding from her that I was speaking to a “jackass,” probably about her. When in reality, it was Jim Palmer on the television, talking about the O’s.<\/p>\n
That’s typical.<\/p>\n
Anything she hears, she assumes is someone talking about her. And anyone she thinks<\/i> she hears is automatically a “jackass.”<\/p>\n
She sleeps wrong, and her neck hurts? “Some jackass broke into the house and did something to my neck.”<\/p>\n
Her skin is dry and itchy? “Some jackass broke into the house and threw acid on me.”<\/p>\n
She can’t find tea bags? “Some jackass broke into the house and took the tea bags.”<\/p>\n
She hears a car pass on the road? “Some jackass just drove off, and he was looking in all the windows.”<\/p>\n
I’m not sure what in her mind makes these phantoms automatic jackasses. I wonder if she even realizes that she’s using the word “jackass” with a strange regularity.<\/p>\n
The odd thing about writing this post? I don’t think I’ve used the word “jackass” in years. If ever. It was never a part of my vocabulary. I find it linguistically unexciting.<\/p>\n
But to my grandmother, it’s a handy linguistic tag to describe the people that exist solely in her mind.<\/p>\n
At least she doesn’t mean it literally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After watching the Cubs :cubs: dispatch the Blue Jays 7-4 this afternoon, I flipped the television over to MASN to catch the end of the Orioles\/Pirates game. The Orioles had coughed up a couple of runs earlier in the game, had clawed back to 4-2, and then, moments after I switched the channel, I watchedContinue reading “On Terminology”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[159,360],"class_list":["post-1865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-grandmother","tag-language","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1865\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}