Sunday, April 03, 2005

Things I had to learn by living in Texas

Just a brief moment of levity before I get back to the grind. This was from an e-mail I received a couple years ago and kept in my Yahoo! Mail forever, because I always forget to purge:

Armadillos sleep in the middle of the road with all four feet in the air.
There are 5,000 types of snakes and 4,998 live in Texas. There are 10,000
types of spiders. All 10,000 live in Texas, plus a few no one has ever seen
before. Raccoons will test your melon crop and let you know when they are
ripe. If it grows, it will stick you. If it crawls, it will bite you!
Nothing will kill a mesquite tree. There are valid reasons some people put
razor wire around their house. A tractor is NOT an all terrain vehicle.
They do get stuck. The wind blows at 90 mph from Oct 2 till June 25, then
it stops totally until October 2. Onced and twiced are words. Coldbeer is
one word. People actually grow and eat okra. Green grass DOES burn. When
you live in the country you don't have to buy a dog. City people drop them
off at your front gate in the middle of the night. The sound of coyotes
howling at night only sounds good for the first few weeks. When a buzzard
sits on the fence and stares at you, it's time to see a doctor. Fix-in-to
is one word. A TANK is a dirt hole that holds water for irrigation,
watering the cows, or swimming There ain't no such thing as "lunch". There
is only dinner and then there's supper. "Sweetened ice tea" is appropriate
for all meals and you start drinking it when you are two. Backwards and
forwards means I know everything about you. "Jeet?" is actually a phrase
meaning, "did you eat?" You don't have to wear a watch because it doesn't
matter what time it is. You work until you're done or it's too dark to see.

3 comments:

B said...

Hello...my first name is B and my last name is Gullible....does a buzzard really know when you are about to die (assuming you're not bleeding all over the place)?

English Professor said...

Bless your heart, Steve, we simple folks are just so glad that y'all came to see us. :-)

B--buzzards look for (lack of) movement. So if you're sunbathing, it might be a good idea to turn over occasionally, or reach for a glass of sweet tea.

red.hot.mamma! said...

i have a few corections, for any non-native texans reading this:

1. it's fixin' to, not fix-in-to. and it's not that it's one word, but that it's used at all. ex. i'm fixin' to go git sumthin' to eat. d'ya eat yet?

2. it's "sweet tea," not "sweetened." and technically, that's more of a deep south thing than a texan thing. you can find sweet tea here occasionally, but usually it comes over ice without any sugar & you add in your sweetener of choice. in other states (LA, MS, AL, etc.), the sugar is added to the hot water when the tea is brewed. (yes, i'm avoiding my appellate brief right now)

3. the phrase "might could" is lacking from this list. as in, "i might could git sumthin' t'eat. bring me some sweet tea, ya'll."

final point: listen, furriner, ya come here, ya adapt. we used to be our own cuntry, ya know.

(woo! sleep deprivation makes me write crazy things.)