cesperanza

This whole set of threads is bouncing around in my mind and zinging off all kinds of language and historical things from my family.

For instance: my mother looked askance at me (gave me side-eye) when I was reading science fiction novels because to her they were just this side of skeevy. Disreputable. Not what a woman should be reading. This, of course, was based on her reaction to something from an early cheap sci-fi magazine sometime in the 1920s or 1930s -- or possibly to the broadcast of War of the Worlds, which she heard. So, to get around this and update her ideas a little, I read aloud to her while she was ironing: I read "And He Built A Crooked House", by Robert Heinlein.

She loved it. Not just because it had women as characters (where were women in the 1920s and 1930s pulps, I ask you?) but because it was about designing houses and what works and doesn't -- and she'd designed our house. I also read her "Farmer Giles of Ham" so she'd have a sense of Tolkien, and she liked that one too, but it was full of English jokes and she got those already (being Canadian, and with a Welsh Londoner for a father.)

What I have been thinking is how ordinary everyday technology-- the way we live, the things we use to live with -- changed so very little for centuries. You had chaises and phaetons in the Regency era and wagons in the time of Henry V, but they were still pulled by horses. And then you got the Model T and it all started to switch over. Mom was 14 before the village where she lived got electricity with the Rural Electrification Project; she grew up without indoor plumbing, and when Grandma ran a boarding house they were all sharing one bathroom and a lot of chamber pots.

All of which sounds totally alien now, but that was the 1920s and 1930s. One of the cousins on the farm wrote us with great excitement about getting indoor plumbing in about 1960. And it wasn't just Canada. I've read that Washington, D.C., had something like 15,000 outhouses during WWII, which is something absolutely nobody talks about now.

And then to go from that to now, in what... not quite 70 years? With all the language and knowledge that has changed? You were talking up above about people using psychological terms in ordinary speech -- that happened since the late 1980s, outside of universities. Things are not just changing, they're rolling and tumbling and the language with them.

And I look at Bucky and Steve and think of Mom -- they'd be her contemporaries, she'd be a little older (born 1914, died 1992) and I can see this same sort of awe about the changes that she had.

I need to tell you one more language thing that drove me crazy when it used to happen. I would come home from a date (didn't matter who, or where, or what we were doing) and if Dad was home he'd ask me, "So, how did you make out?" And what he meant was, did you have a good time, was the movie ok, how was the food at the place you went, etc. But what I *heard* was asking how far I'd gone with the guy sexually -- and I guarantee you, that was not what Dad was asking, though it might have been subtext so far down that he didn't realize it. But I used to giggle when I answered, and he never understood why. It is just such a 1940s way of speech.

See what happens? You get language talk going, and it bounces into my mind and all sorts of things fall out.