"Me Talk Pretty One Day"

Apologies to David Sedaris for cadging the title of one of his best-selling books for this blog, which is probably skimmed over by tens of people (I can only hope).

If you’ve never read one of Sedaris’ subversively funny yet oddly sweet books of personal essays, get thee to a book store (or, if you’re a cheapskate like me, your local library) and start gobbling them down.

One of the subjects Sedaris comes back to again and again is his large, off-the-wall Greek-American family, which includes his actress-comedienne sister Amy. Being the youngest in an Irish-American brood of five with its own cast of immediate and extended family characters, I can relate. So far, the Bradys haven’t produced any notables like David and Amy, but I’ll bet the constant chatter that bounced off the four walls of our modest family Cape was also echoing throughout the Sedaris family abode.

And it wasn’t only the kids who were running off at the mouth. Houses were small (there were no McMuffins back then, let alone McMansions) and families were large (having only two or three kids meant you simply weren’t doing your part to propagate the Catholic faith). A popular saying was, “Children should be seen and not heard” which, loosely translated, meant: “We need to have an adult conversation now. We have no choice but to have it in front of you, so shut up and don’t interrupt!”

One of the big benefits of this cozy family arrangement was that there was no “firewall” between kid speak and adult talk. We were exposed to a slew of wildly inventive and mildly inappropriate bons mots like, “Get off the table Mabel, the two dollars is for beer,” “I’m hotter than a dog passing peach pits” or “Look who made the Irish sports page” (aka the obituaries).

All of this chitchat instilled in us a love of language that set me off on my writerly way and, I suspect, may have done the same for Sedaris.

Nowadays, I despair not only at the dearth of clan conversation but the dust-on-the-divan quality of it. I guess it’s hard to hold a dishy dialogue when you have four people inhabiting a living room that’s the size of my one-bedroom apartment, or an SUV that could do double duty as Army transport in downtown Kabul. Maybe that’s why I hear “awesome” used to exhaustion or “like” like, a lot.

But I think the final nail in juicy conversation’s coffin is the rabid use of digital and cell phone cameras, not to mention video cameras. Why bother using verbal gymnastics to describe an event when you can simply aim, shoot and upload?

I don’t own a camera, digital or otherwise, or a cell phone (vile contraptions!). What I do own is one helluva linguistic legacy, which is amply demonstrated by the following ditty, courtesy of my grandfather, the late Cecil Murphy:

“My fingers press my only cent,

My mind upon the rum is bent,

But three things I want:


Tobacco, rum, and snuff.


If I snuff I cannot puff,


If I puff I cannot snuff.


Hoping for better times to come,


Here’s my cent, gimme a rum.“

If you ask me, that’s, like, pretty awesome.