Oct 20 2009
The Country Cousin in My Phone
I was fooling with my PDA today, checking email, when the data feed paused and I received this message: “fetching data.” Not “retrieving” but “fetching.” It brought to mind my passel of country relatives, Carolina Appalachia folk who call a valley a “holler” and say “over yonder” for “over there” and “dinner” for “lunch” and “ice box” for “fridge” and “tater” for “potato” and “reckon” for “think.” When, at 7, we moved North, I was shocked at how rough Northerners talked. They never addressed elders as “sir” or “ma’am” and they called children “kids.” They also said “I swear” a lot, as in “I swear I’m gonna kill you.” In the Old South, even the word “swear” seemed too strong to some and so they used “Sewanee,” as in “I Sewanee I’m-a-gonna kill you.”
I used to think my country cousins were as exotic as extraterrestrials. They lived away back in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains in an unpainted house on a dirt road. Predictably, we called them our “hillbilly cousins.” Their big old house–with its squeaky unpainted floorboards, steep narrow stairs, and dim drafty hallways–was thoroughly spooky. But I was eager to see it every time, and especially eager for a spine-tingling tour of the cold-storage cave across the road, its dirt ceiling carpeted with black shiny crickets. During one visit, we boys crowded around the hog pen out back and watched the big beasts rooting through the mud and kitchen leavings. Then the younger of our two cousins began to taunt the hogs and kick at their heads with his bare feet. Suddenly, the biggest hog grabbed him by the pants cuff and began to pull him into the pen. We three boys played tug-of-war with that hog, our little cousin—yanked between us and the pig — screaming for his life. One of us ran to fetch their grandpa, who came running out immediately — which told us, for sure, how dire the situation was. With his big fist, he rapped the hog on the head and the hog let go. Then the old man pulled himself up, adjusted the single strap of his denim overalls, and set the shaken boy on the ground, where he promptly collapsed in hiccups of relief. “You leave them hogs alone,” the old man scolded. “He would’ve eat you up right quick!”
“Fetch” comes to us from Old English (feccan), unlike “retrieve,” which comes from Old French: retrover. Some say we prefer Old English and Anglo Saxon words because they are simpler and more rooted in every day life. Let us not forget that Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch that pail. My question is, Who was the software programmer who decided on “fetch” instead of “retrieve” for my phone? It’s a Nokia, by the way, from Finland. Nähdään! That’s Finnish for “See you later.”
Related posts
Comments Off
Our Victorian library is done. Before I started, I told a contractor friend that it would take me only a week to put the thing together. Mind you, I have never built a library before. The work took me two months. That, in a nutshell, is the story of my experience as a house rehabber. Anybody who does this kind of work will tell you: estimate the time and expense of your undertaking, then multiply that times three. Or four. Or five. I’ve been doing this for 10 years now and still I won’t accept a realistic appraisal of the work before me. This denial, no doubt, is a matter of survival and it informs most aspects of my life.
Euphemistically, friends call me “optimistic.†If I am, you can blame my mother, who always told me that “anything is possible.†A variation of this was “you can be anything you want to be.†Or “you can accomplish anything you set your mind to.†I guess that included being an astronaut or becoming, dare I say it, president of the U.S.A. Maybe you heard this too. It seems endemic to life in America, but I’m not convinced that this kind of encouragement is all that healthy.
In the main, when it comes to daunting tasks—like building something I’ve never built before–my philosophy is, in the words of my North 
As you can see, there’s a world of difference between the cobbled-together Ikea shelves we started with and the built-from-scratch replacement. We wanted it to look like it’s been here for a hundred years. The one thing left to complete is installation of the stained glass window on either end of the case. Jill just finished a class in stained-glass repair so that she can fix those missing windows.
We think the library looks pretty cool. But, mind you, I’m no cabinet maker. If a cabinet maker took a close look, he/she would shudder. Be that as it may, the books are back and everything is in working order. The only problem is, we have more books than shelf space. So, this summer I’ll build some more book cases, maybe in the hall.
Lately I’ve been receiving — unsolicited–amorous emails from Russian women. Three so far. It’s the kind of thing I’ve come to expect from the 
I don’t know how Katya and the others got my address. I do not visit questionable sites on the 
Sadly, I assumed that Katya is a prostitute and her letter a scam. She attached a photo. I debated for a full week before I opened it, figuring it could be a virus bomb. But I’ve never heard of a photo carrying a 
We could consider the unbidden solicitations from women in Russia just another element of the 
If Katya does get out, will she end up, say, in a Tulsa, Oklahoma, McMansion, reveling as she barefoots across her new wall-to-wall off-white carpet? Will she take English classes at the community college and study diligently for her citizenship exam while waiting for her kids to get home from Christian private school? Will she make cabbage rolls — her specialty — for her husband, a manager at the local oil refinery? Will he allow her to send for her mother? Will he rave to his friends about her borscht, as well as her beauty, and call her “my little matruska doll”? And some days, when she gazing down at her competent hands and daydreaming of returning to dentistry, will she picture the snowy Volga River and the minarets of the Kazan mosques and the clamorous crowd of the Kazan footbol club when it wins its division title and ask herself, “Why did I ever send those emails?”
