As near as I can figger the title of this  piece may be one of them oxymorons or maybe a spoonerism.  It don’t make much difference in my opinion, and it don’t make sense neither.

Most folks love their pets whether they be fido, feline of horsey, but my definition of a pet peeve is a thing that tends to get my dander up, or at least make the hair on the nape of my neck snap to attention.

For instance imagine the teacher when she, or he, is scrawling something you should know on the old blackboard.  Suddenly an impurity in that chalk quits marking and begins to etch.  Or someone rakes a fingernail across that surface.  If you’re wired like I am, that there can be a pestiferous peeve, but not a pet peeve, at least in my judgment.

A notorious end of “you know” when a story teller runs out of a way to wind up a sentence with “you know” for a tail almost drove me stark raving mad insane when it was in it’s heyday and common parlance to the nth.

I had a habit of keeping count of “you knows” during those days, and likely as not be unable to recall the story that was related.  That lame, two word expression has now passed away and is hopefully interred in an unmarked grave.

There’s another pain inducing word that seems to be waning away and losing steam, and it would suit me if the news media was fined for each and every attempt to apply CPR.  I want to be freed from “hunkered down”.  Whoever dragged it back into our vocabulary should be horse whipped for the crime.

“Scrootched” was an ancient forerunner of this trio and it was a word that was common back when I was a “barefoot boy with cheek of tan”.  That was way back during the depression of the late ‘20s, and was the country’d pone and cornbread of that day and time.

If you were forced to bunk with a brother, like I was, such commands were not at all uncommon during a long and miserable night out on Poverty Knob.

“Scrootch over Frank—you’re pushing me over the edge!”  He, of course made the same accusation to me.

Now, that scrootch was almightily handy to request between moving over and stooping down.  It was not a character in Charles Dickens’s immortal Christmas Story.

Nossir, scrootch was kinfolk to hunker and both flourished in our rural surroundings.

Hunkered sprang full grown from “On one’s haunches” and it meant simply a person sank down to a squatting position on their haunches.

“Scrootch down on your hunkers and dig that crabgrass out with your fingers.  Your hoeing up half my goober crop with you mislicks!” was a complaint of one of my employers back in the long ago and far away.

And always remember to warm a brick and put a towel around it down at your feet during a cold night.  Then, you won’t have to scrootch up into a ball.

Let me hear from you.

My phone number is 254-893-5063.

My postal address is 333 W. Ayers, De Leon TX 76444.

You can e-mail me at Charles@CharlesChupp.com.

By Charles Chupp, Copyright ©2008 Charles Chupp