2004-08-19 - 7:52 p.m.
The other day, at a rummage sale, I bought a small goblet. It has golden eggs with embossed hens around the rim. Betwix the golden eggs are white eggs with "Egg In Your Beer" written in gold lettering. This glass was a must-have, as my relatives used to used this expression. For those unfamiliar with this saying, it means, "What else do you want? You already have it good!"
There are so many expressions my relatives used to use that you just don't hear these days. Many of them were Polish. When someone was talking too much, they were called "papuga" or, parrot. When K-K would snap at Ri-Ri (or Ri-Ri at K-K), they would use the Polish word for snake, which sounded like "zh-mi-ah." Grandma's penchant for saving everything earned her the title of junk lady, pronounced "jah-doov-kah" in Polish.
The extent of Polish that the grandkids learned (or tolerated learning) was mostly swear words. We delighted in saying shit as "goov-naw." We never knew enough Polish to string a sentence together, just enough to insult each other. When we were bad, the relatives would discuss us in Polish. We couldn't understand the words, but the tone was certainly, "Those kids act like savages, what's wrong with their mother?"
When Grandma and her sisters were growing up, they went to a Polish school. My great-grandparents had come to Chicago from Poland. As my Grandma told it, there was an English school right by the house, but they had to walk blocks to the Polish school. As a result, my Grandma and here sisters were all bilingual.
It wasn't just Polish expressions that my relatives used. Grandma often said, "I don't eat to live, I live to eat." As dementia set in, the order of this phrase was often mixed up. "I don't live to eat... I... no, I don't eat to live... no..." and so on.
Often they mixed up names and phrases, such as Grandpa calling the "Dairy Queen" the "Queen Dairy." I am convinced this is hereditary, as I called the "Cold Stone Creamery" the "Stone Cold" the other day. If some day I start rattling off nonsense in Polish, now you know why!
