The Exactness of the Inexact (standard:humor, 1473 words)
Author: J P St. Jullian	Added: Jan 03 2003	Views/Reads: 9758/2090	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A study in the exactness of the inexact

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

very similar to “As unknown as Adam's off ox” in that it makes a 
comparison; not with the central unknown thing, but with a lesser known 
thing connected with it. 

Another technique my stepfather and his friends used to make the inexact
more exact was by using numbers sparingly.  My stepdad used to say that 
a thing wasn't worth “two whoops in hell.”  It was strange to me that 
no one ever bothered to calculate the value of  “one whoop in hell,” 
although many things were referred to as not worth “two whoops in 
hell.”  So it stood to reason that unless the whoop had a negative 
value in the nether regions, one whoop was of far less value that two 
whoops. 

It also seemed back then that time could also be expressed numerically
in shakes of a lamb's tail, and fastidiousness was usually exactly 
defined by the number of bites one took of a cherry (usually up to 
four).  I would hear most of the men describe the temperature by saying 
it was as hot as hell, but my stepfather always would say that it was 
“hotter than the seven brass hinges of hell,” so obviously hinges were 
hotter than the surrounding area and the number seven revealed a close 
mathematical observation.  So went the second method of making the 
inexact exact.  They numbered the innumerable with extreme accuracy. 

My stepdad was a character when it came to being exact.  He said that
since any approximation must of necessity include a certain amount of 
inexactness, one should NEVER approximate.  So, using his method, if 
there are no exact numbers, one must make them up.  According to him, 
there are about forty-'leven ways of doing this.  “A bad number is 
better than a good approximation,” he always said.   I remember reading 
Paul Bunyan as a kid and his blue ox babe was 42 axe handles and a plug 
of star tobacco between the eyes.  That was exactness!  Using this same 
method a man might be as hungry as a she wolf suckling nine pups to a 
side, but bet one of his friends a hundred acres of red hogs and win 
the bet nine ways from Sunday.  I think that in such an instance, it 
would be more important, and of course more appropriate to have a clear 
deed to a ten acre lot in heaven. 

Many folk expressions are made by adding one exaggeration to another
until you have a complete statement.  For instance, one could be as 
cross as a bear; or as cross as a bear with two cubs; or as cross as a 
bear with a sore tail.  But to really drive a point home one could say 
he was as cross as a bear with two cubs and a sore tail. 

My stepdad must have known some pretty awful people in his day.  He used
to refer to some of them as not being worth a three cent piece with a 
hole in it; and others he said were low-downed enough to walk under a 
snake's belly with a top hat on.   I also remember hearing him expound 
on one fellow's chances of marrying my sister.  He said that this 
particular fellow had as much chance to marry my sister as a celluloid 
cat chasing an asbestos dog through hell.  I remember specifically what 
he said one evening after we had come back from a visit to my sister's 
new apartment.  He said that the living room of that apartment was too 
small to cuss a cat in without getting hair in your teeth.  He had 
many, many other wild expressions.  “As hot as a fox in a forest fire,” 
“as busy as a one armed paper hanger with hives,” “as gloomy as a 
graveyard on a wet Sunday,” “as small as the little end of nothing,” 
and many more. 

I suppose those grand old guys who taught me in my youth could have been
a mite more exaggerative in their inexactness, but they still had some 
respect for the truth.  Whatever the methods they used in forming 
proverbial expressions about the inexact----whether by particularizing 
the unparticularable, numbering the innumerable, measuring the 
immeasurable, or even enlarging upon the already enlarged----I always 
found in them the drama and the freshness of the concrete, and the 
very, very, unusual. 


Tweet