Davisms

Selected Vocabulary From The Lexicon Of A South Carolinian Transplant

Even the cats look on in horrified awe when Dave talks story

Dave is my neighbor. Well, he was my neighbor for ten years. He has since moved away, but that is not the focus of this feature. To describe Dave is quite a vast undertaking, for he is of average height and size. Dave's an outstanding electrician, a very hard worker, and devoted to his family. He also has a mouth dirtier than the bilge of an oil tanker, and every word that exudes from that colorful orifice is delivered with a slow, South Carolina drawl.

That feature alone would make Dave a bit of an odd huckleberry in the diverse people shrubbery that makes up the Pacific Northwest, but he has this added flair that really makes his utterances shine. I call them Davisms.

Today's vocabulary word is: Palomino

Dave would spend hours at my dining room table talking randomly, complaining about whatever thing was irritating him at that particular time. Something about Hawaii had come up, and this is where the vocabulary word of the story became lexicon legend.

"Well, what is Tom again?" Dave asked me pointedly, "You know! It starts with a P?"

"What are you talking about Dave?" I replied in my absent minded way, for I was busy canning zuchini salsa.

"You know, He's a palomino." He drawled on, "One of those palominos from High-Why-EE"

"Tom's a golden horse?" I queried, I remember thinking that I should probably be paying more attention at this point of the exchange.

"NO!" Dave barked at me, "One of those palominos, you know! They wear grass skirts and dance a lot."

"I'm pretty sure that you mean Polynesian." I responded carefully, for at this point my husband Tom, who is Native Hawaiian, had walked into the room. He was staring at Dave with an expression that has only crossed Tom's face on the rare occasion that he has witnessed or heard something so incredibly stupid that he is assessing the creature that uttered it for signs of intelligent life.

"Yeah, that's what I said." was Dave's reply.

He then proceeded to move on with his daily laments and continued eating his way through his fifteenth plate of cookies as if the whole incident had never taken place.

Just for clarification:

Palomino

Polynesian

Source

As always, with the exception of the cited photo, all the images in this post were taken on the author's cookie crumb bedecked iPhone.