The Wormlips Scrapbook

Like many people, I collect words. Malapropisms, mixed metaphors, Freudian slips and spoonerisms are the mainstay of my collection, but there’s much more.

People who read more than they listen, like my first ex-husband, are a great source of creative pronunciation and verbal hybrids. He once went on about his friend who’d had her driver’s license confisticated.

The trouble with my favorite garden-variety mispronunciations is that they’re dangerous. If I like the ring of something, I adopt it. That’s fine when I’m with the right people. But please — if I’m trying to impress someone, don’t let me do like another ex-husband: with a grand sweep of his hand he said, “I’m going to get the shirt, the pants … the whole gamoo.”

I also love those spontaneous sparks of insight that emerge in adage form. As Mom once said, “You know, dear: the thing about truisms is that they’re … well … true.”

This would be the very same mother who, in a moment of revelation, declared, “You realize that even chickens have pecking orders!”

All this by way of introduction: Now and then I’ll post some of my favorite quotations that I (and friends) have gathered from hither and yon.

I asked a certain person of my acquaintance, “Was the book non-fiction?” He replied irritably:

NO! It’s a true story!

These, too, are non-fiction — the true kind — overheard in Real Life.

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My sister, trying to comprehend something, said, “I just can’t wrap my teeth around it.”

According to a Library Journal article by Stephen Abram that Sally forwarded, the Chinese representation of the word for change combines the characters for danger and opportunity. Perhaps they see the relationship between the two as equal. I don’t. This is how I’d draw it, based on my current experience. The round thing, of course, is opportunity.

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Poor Mamma Ginna. She’s had another stroke. She can no longer walk and can barely talk, she’s frail and confused, and she hurts. I asked her daughter-in-law, who visits her each day in the hospital in West Virginia, to send her my love. All Mamma Ginna could do was smile. Looks like she may not make it till August when we’re flying back to visit her. She’s always saying to me, “I wish you lived closer.” Me too. She’s had a long life. Still, my heart hurts badly again at the idea of never seeing her again.

Speaking of heartbreak, at Spanish class last night a fellow estudiante, Yumi, did a report on a song called La Copa Rota. It’s the most wonderfully tortured song ever. Here’s my abbreviation of her excellent translation:

Drowning in jealousy
a Bohemian sits in the cantina,
hopeless and sad,
his nerves wrecked,
crying without relief
like a tormented crazy man
because that ungrateful woman left him.

One night, like a madman,
he bit the wineglass
and made a sharp edge that destroyed his lip.
And the blood that dripped
mixed in with the wine
and this cry shuddered
to all those in the bar:

Don’t worry, campañeros,
if I destroy my mouth.
Don’t worry that with the edge of this glass
I want to erase
the mark of the kiss
that the traitor gave me.

Waiter, serve me the broken glass.
Serve me so it destroys
this obsessive fever.
Waiter, serve me the broken glass.
I want to bleed drop by drop
the venom of her love.

It doesn’t get better than that. It made me want to run right home and start composing my own songs, full of despair and longing and blood. I think my first canción will ponder the eternal question: why have I never found my own true love, even though I’ve been sitting here in my living room for years just waiting for him?

Ayyiyi!
Mi corazon está congelado
en este enfierno de solitud sepulcral.
Mi sangre como pecina escarchada
No puede correr por mis venas estrangulares.
AY-yi-yiii…

Oooh, I’m liking it. “My heart is frozen in this hell of tomblike solitude. My blood like frosted sludge can’t run through my strangled veins.” Hey, I rock at this.

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