Funny, Interesting, Unusual English Words -- Like Sardoodledom
- Thread starter TezriLi
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When I was a child, our milk was gray. Ugliest milk. I wouldn't drink it without chocolate powder. In fact, I hated both milk and cheese until I met my first husband, and his family brought milk and cheese down from Minnesota. They had invited me over to their camper for dinner, and when they said it was lasagna, I knew I had to be brave and gracious, eating it and not letting them know that I did not like cheese.That has the holy moly Red Rider smell of truth along with using the last cup of cream to smother a cabbage, and adding sugar water to blue john (skim milk), so all the children will have a glass of milk.
I had to check the spelling of blue john because I have never seen it written. My great grandmother would not drink skim milk, which she called blue john. My mother has what you would call hips and boobs, which makes her a big fan of skim milk for calorie counting etc. Breakfast with the three of them had its funny moments.
Also, great grandmother would not eat sweat potatoes maybe because she had too much of them during the Depression. Her daughter in law, my grandmother, makes sweet potatoes for Christmas and Thanksgiving because her mother made sweet potatoes, also likely a recipe from the Depression.
It's too much of a funny.
(But I'd been reared in a pastor's home. My sister and I had been taught that no matter what, we ate what was put before us and graciously thanked our host. We had even been shown a movie about such manners, in which a caterpillar was crawling across the salad. The teen rolled the caterpillar up in a lettuce leaf and swallowed it. So I have eaten in the filthiest homes and the dirtiest tables. We ate in a home in which we could see tiny maggots and live & dead fruit flies in the soy sauce they kept on the table.)
So eating lasagna should be a cinch....
And it was! I thought I'd died and gone to the good place! Then I tasted that Minnesota milk and asked for more. Then more! Minnesota cheese and milk. Ya just can't beat them!
So this afternoon, with regard to milk, I did something I'd never done before: I Bought Buttermilk!
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Grey milk doesn't sound too pleasant! I've not noticed any difference in milk wherever I've lived although I do remember once drinking milk from the cooler (after the milking parlour) on a farm in Wales when I was a kid. That particular farm had a mostly Guernsey herd and the milk was richer.
The main change in my lifetime with milk has been the change from the daily deliveries by the milkman to getting milk from the shops and supermarkets. We usually get semi skimmed these days but when we have got the ordinary pasteurised, there is one thing I seem to notice. With the old milk bottles, if you let them stand, you would get a really good layer of "top of the bottle" cream. The stuff in the plastic bottles doesn't seem to do that.
As for regional differences, the one I do notice is water. Even though all water is treated, there is quite a difference in taste between the soft water from the mountains of Snowdonia in Wales and the very hard water from the bore holes in Norfolk, I much prefer the former although I'm told hard water is better for you.
As for buttermilk. You can drink it all the week and have whiskey on a Sunday! The song is about Seth Davy, a Liverpool street entertainer who died around the start of the 20th century.
I think that American Jazz must come from West Africa and Wales.
I read a strange story about hard water in a book, maybe by Stephen Ambrose, about the Transcendental Railroad. During the construction of the Union Pacific, or eastern half, a series of locomotives exploded on the same section of tract. Examination of the boilers led to the belief that minerals in the water had corroded the metal and caused the explosions.
Gray milk? Mom alternates between skim milk and almond milk. My Missouri relatives talk about weedy milk, which is milk from a cow, which has eaten the wrong kind grass.
My athletic friends and I drink whole milk to get the extra calories. It drives the food police to apoplexy.
The next time I need an example of the down side of democracy, I might use the food police as an example.
You'll have to explain that one to me. I know jazz was developed by African Americans and that it was influenced, eg. by blues but I'm not getting why specifically West Africa and I'm not sure where Wales fits in.
I've not heard of corrosion problems. It can cause problems with plumbing but I thought that was always because of a build up of lime scale restricting the flow.
What the food police don't know, or are not telling us, is that fat removes fat from the human body. In fact, milk fat is sometimes used in diet pills. While I was dieting, I used only whole milk for that reason. However, I have had to cut milk out of my -- maybe! -- and now, I use only almond milk.
Now that I think about it, Ambrose likely did not say corrosion. Maybe the minerals clogged rather than corroded.
American slaves are said to have come mostly from West Africa. The names for black person, which have become too vulgar to speak, originally meant Nigerian. So since Jazz is the black folks music, it must have come from West Africa.
The Welsh music you have posted has a sort of blues quality. Gramps’ family has one Welsh name. Is Howell a Welsh name? Other than that I don’t know of Welsh being an American ethnic group. If Wales contributed to Jazz, maybe historians bunched it with English, Scottish, or Irish.
The food police around here insist that animal fat causes cholesterol. Not true for me, my cholesterol measures so low that it almost falls off the chart.
Thanks for the explanation for West Africa.
I'd think of Howell as being a Welsh name.
I'd struggling to remember what Welsh music I've posted. Here is a tune I would probably think was a Welsh traditional dance tune if I heard it for the first time without knowing where it came from.
I'd imagine Welsh music did travel to America along with music from the rest of the music from the British Isles.
From the dance tune side of things btw, one of the best known collections of Irish music was collected in America. They were collected by Francis O'Neil, at one time Chief of police in Chicago. He is reputed to have given people jobs on the force for their ability to play Irish music.
I have a cousin who plays a violin in a group like that. I think they call it Blue Grass ot Bluegrass. They are fanatic about playing every note together and on pitch. It is supposed to be somehow related to Jazz, but it seems so different. I don't know how they are related.
I think bluegrass can have some jazz influence in it but its main root is the music of Appalachia which in turn derives from the music of the British Isles. It seems to me to have gone it's own way quite a bit from there and I think was heavily influenced by the performances of a few players including Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs.
I think I've just noticed something there, Ghid. You seem to be hearing the instrumentation whereas (I can't explain what it is but) there is something about the melodic structure of the tune I gave that would lend me to think it was Welsh. Of course a number of tunes do exist in more than one repertoire but I might pick up that a tune is say being played in say an Irish rather than a Scottish style.
Police Departments play bagpipes likely because so many police think of themselves and Irish or Scots-Irish Americans. Joan Rivers had bagpipes at her funeral, so they appear to have had wider influence than I knew.
I doubt that the former slaves had much interest in bagpipes, but the stringed instruments must have influenced Jazz. Africans still make drums with animal skin over a wooden tube. Strings on a drum could be the origin of banjos, which I think are African.
Gramps’s grandfather owned various guitarlike instruments called mandolins, which look very much like instruments in the videos.
I doubt that the former slaves had much interest in bagpipes, but the stringed instruments must have influenced Jazz. Africans still make drums with animal skin over a wooden tube. Strings on a drum could be the origin of banjos, which I think are African.
Gramps’s grandfather owned various guitarlike instruments called mandolins, which look very much like instruments in the videos.
I have never seen buttermilk. I have heard that it is something like liver. People consider it nutritious, but they don't like to look at it.
There are several types of bagpipe from the British Isles. The best known are probably the Scottish Great Highland Bagpipes and the Irish Uileann Pipes. I knew they existed in other parts of Europe but hadn't been aware that the are African types. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bagpipes
There are African instruments with necks as well as the drum part that could be considered to be the predecessor of the banjo. The picture, The Old Plantation may be of interest to you. It's the earliest known American painting with a banjo like instrument on it.
I call the group of instruments in the Welsh tune clip "mandolin family". There have been mandolin bands using different sizes and pitches of mandolin and you will find instruments such as a cello mandolin or mandocello. I'm not sure what the one on the right of the picture is but I think its an instrument known as the "mandola" or "octave mandolin" (it's usually tuned GDAE an octave bellow the mandolin). The other possibility is the "Irish bouzouki", a late 1960s invention which was sort of based on the Greek bouzouzi but built like a flat back mandolin. The difference between the two is the scale length. I'd know which it was if I picked it up to play it (I find the bouzouki a bit of a stretch for GDAE melody playing) but I'm not always sure when I see a clip of someone else playing.
Could Wales be the source of American mandolins?
I'm reading a book about George Washington. During the Seven Years War he commanded of the Virginia Regiment, which had Irish, Scots, and English recruits. The lack of a mention of Welshmen makes me wonder if historians include Wales in one of the other groups. And anyone must wonder if any played bagpipes or mandolins.
If you had asked me, I would have guessed that mandolins came from Italy or Spain because I associate violins with Italy and guitars with Spain, not because of any knowledge, but maybe more of a stereotype.
I’m really surprised, like a holy moly Red Rider, cowabunga moment, to learn about the wide spread use of bagpipes, and I would not have connected bagpipes with banjos. However, they both use animal skin, so they do have a connection.
The Old Plantation picture has a drum, maybe a flute, and two women hold bags or maybe towels, which could be musical instruments. The flute might be a stick. If it is a stick, maybe the picture is a wedding. The couple will be married when they jump over the stick. That turns out to be the standard interpretation.
I wondered if maybe the slaves are too well dressed. If the artist is really the plantation owner, then he might have had a more romantic view. He might have added clothes to suggest how it should be rather than what he saw.
I might have confused you with that Welsh clip as I was trying to show a melody rather than the instrumentation. As far as I know the round back mandolin is Italian. Off the top of my head, I'd suggest the development of the flat back mandolins would be American probably with companies like Gibson.
The instrument most associated with Wales is the harp. This is usually the concert harp but there is a traditional Welsh harp called the triple harp.
Other traditional Welsh instruments are the Pibgorn and the Crwth. There is also a Welsh bagpipe.
Crasdant are a lot more traditional than what I gave before.
A piano is sort of a harp inside a box. And an instrument older than pianos is the harpsichord? Is that right?