Re: Does anyone else cringe...

Cool Guy wrote:

(Does anyone else cringe....)

> ...when they hear someone say something like: "I've learned my lesson."?

> (Instead of: "I've learnt my lesson.")

Born a barefoot penniless ignorant farmgirl, quite literally on a rural Oklahoma farm,
one of many lessons I learned during my struggle to survive, is looking down your
nose upon others will often earn you a blackeye.

Eagletown, my birthplace, was and is nothing more than a postoffice and a
general store, with an old wood bench out front. Our regional population
back then, about three-hundred. Today, maybe a dozen more. Of a good
two-hundred children, only a dozen or so of us enjoyed a family which
could afford to release kids from farmwork to attend school.

Almost daily during school lunch, Johnny England would ask me,

"Yall got any sweet mon-taters in your'n dinner bucket?"

Does his language make you, the reader, cringe? If so, buzz off.

There is little I would not give, save for my family's hard earned security,
to return to those days of wonderment and endearment. What I would
give to go back, to revisit, to speak with my true voice.

I have learned a person who considers himself learned has learnt little.

Your "learnt" is a British dialectic inflection. Are you suggesting my
dear childhood friend, Johnny England, is less of a person not being
British, or conversely, the British are superior to other cultures based
on a premise of idiomatic language inflections?

In my native tongue, there is no word for "learnt" nor do we make use
of past, present nor future tense verbs; doing so is inefficient. However,
we do have an expression, "hatak nan ithana" a "learned man" in your
native British tongue, but in my tongue those three words are a centuries
old story of a man who is revered for his knowledge and demeanor;
a chieftain, a medicine man, a wise brave, a tribal elder, a father.

Am I to cringe when I hear you utter "learned man" which imparts so
very little, is of such insignificance, is so trivial, compared to my three
words which impart a story of our culture, three words which impart
a story which takes a child a decade or more to truly understand?

Your language says so little with so many words. My language says
so much, with so few words. Which of us should cringe, rightly?

"White man build big fire, stand far away. Red man build small fire, sit close."

Be careful about looking down that nose of yours, you may earn a blackeye.

Purl Gurl
.

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