UA37/44 Tidbits of Kentucky Folklore
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Western Kentucky University TopSCHOLAR® Faculty/Staff Personal Papers WKU Archives Records 1955 UA37/44 Tidbits of Kentucky Folklore Gordon Wilson Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/fac_staff_papers Part of the Folklore Commons, Journalism Studies Commons, Linguistic Anthropology Commons, and the Mass Communication Commons Recommended Citation Wilson, Gordon, "UA37/44 Tidbits of Kentucky Folklore" (1955). Faculty/Staff Personal Papers. Paper 161. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/fac_staff_papers/161 This Other is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty/Staff Personal Papers by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ORIGINALS TIDBITS OF KENTUCKY FOLKLORE By Gordon Wilson Vol. VII Nos. 1050 - 1200 Missing: /11084 p.oi'., 1106, 1107, 1108 . "COME HERE, JlJNIOH 11 . The fai tbful old eolored woman· wbo does odd ;jobs at my house bas ,lways called my son Little Gordon, much to the amusement of my cbildren. It was rc1ther appropriate when the boy was small, but since he bas reciched full mcinhood and six feet three, the name seems mit of ])lace. I hav~tried to explain to my students that Li.ttle ris a title 1'Ja.S the form I !mew Rt Fidelity; I had never heard J·unior until long after my own childhood. Very dignified ])80p1e ~ . have even called my son Young Gordon, another old-time designation that suggests to most listeners a quaint old story of early New England, like Hawthorne I s "Young Goodman Br0vm," As I now recall, tber·e were a good rna.ny boys named for their fathers at Fidelity. All sorts of terminoloil;y wane used to separate the younger from the older person with the same rrnme, Little being most common, Some names lent themselves to diminutives, howeverJ1l', and still clo: if the father was named John, it was quite natural to call his son Johnny; Willim11 1 s or Bill's sO11 became Willie or Billy. OilE' oJ<i grandson's wife lady at Fidelity spoke o:f her lrH-f.l-ilr1-# as "my Bill's Willi.awls wife, 11 1rhat is round-about enough, I hope. In many of the languages of the world there are patronymics-- that is, names derived from the name of the parent. Generally it is the father's first name, with a prefix or suffix that denotes son. Jv\y own lcist name is a good Scandincivian illustrcition of that, as the original Wilsons in Scotland were descended from the Vi~.ngs (brave, high-soundi.ng name for pirates) who settled there in the ninth and later centuries, ~ pre:li'ixed to a name is the Scotch-- Gaelic way of showing the same relationship, In Old English times there were several ways o:f making patronymics: adding i.ng or ins or ,just s, as in Hastings, Owens, Johns. Under French influence }"itz came into use(derived :from f_;ids, French for ~): Fitzgibbon, Fitzsimmons, !ll'itzgerald, etc, Among the Scandinavians :Lt :Ls even a ]mown use to add the word ~ daughter, so that a man named Hans could have a daughter lm01vn as Hans I daughter. This list could be prolonged indefinitely, as people of all languages feel fairly safe when they name the son for his father, while it is a bit risky to name him for some idol of the time. Try as he may, he cannot escape being his own father's son, however he might writhe to be reminded of his name for some politician or movie hero or warrier or character in a novel. It is common practi.ce now to write II or III or even ~after a name long used :Ln 3 family, though there is no sure way of !mowing whether the III stands for the third !J.eneration in an unbroken line or merely a third generation name. To be exact, "my Bill's Wil- liam," of whom I spoke earlier,could have written his name William III, as proudly as an English monarch. The rest of us called him Willie, his father Will, his grandfather Billy, When J1.1nior. got to be used for the name of a boy who bore his father's name, some of the children whom I knew were greatly puz- zled. My nephew Albert, Junior, was knovm to many children as "the little Junior boy. 11 I suppose that they thought his surname was J1imi.or. One family in Warren county named a child Mary Junior, not for her mother, whose name was Sarah or some such name, but, according to the mother, "for the little Smith boy. 11 That reminds me of the children at Fidelity who used to speak of Mr. Joe Mont- gomery and his neighbor, Mr. Doctor Wilson(my father). Mri. as a ti.tle was all-inclusive; other titles had to to be suboydinate. C-(A~ But don't forget Herr Doktor in German or Monsieur 1 e "-' ilP< in French. Maybe we should be numbered or lettered, as was a family with whom my wife used to go to school: A, B, and so on through G. I suppose the second genera ti.on then would automa ti.cally be called A prime or A square. What's in a name? Don't ask me. 11 SHE I S BEEN /\J30U'P'11 Once at a party up the creek above FidElity some middle-aged women were discussing the looks and bearing of the girls present. Someone praised one girl for her ease of manner. The aunt-in-law of the girl said, with a great degree of finality: "She's been about." ~.:-1 That settled it; what else could you say? Maybe I had bette~ exp~ain this old term, for it may not be known to you as it was to us at Fidelity. When ten miles was a ''1:f,ur piece, 11 anyone who had " been farther from home thaJ!J that was a world traveler. The young uoman i.n question had visited, once, i.n Pa/!ucah, some Si.fty miles aw,gy; once she had gone for a day or two bo Jv!ernph:is, so far away \:) that I st:il 1 do not l~now how far it must have been. In ad di ti_ on, she had a ssoci_a ted with people who were people, not merely the crude country people such as the ,ones assembled on Sunday morning at Sulphur Springs Church. She hf!d seen society, had d:ined a time " or two at a hotel, had ridden in a rubber-tired buggy! In some words well knoi,m at F':idelity, she hacl "stepped out. 11 However, that word more often meant that some available man was looking for a wife. About a dozen of the people whom I !mew well when I was a child had seen a wide range of the earth. The woman who said that her niece had been about had accomp;mied her husband· to Chicago to the 1893 World I s l'air. She, too, had been about, and she did not let you forget j_ t, Our tobacco salesman, whom we looked at weeks ago, had wandered all over western Kentucky, Western Tennessee, Sou therm ·~ Illinoj_s, and had even been across the MissZppi River into far- away Missouril And he did not hesitate to start a sentence like this: "One day when I was at Carbondale, Illtnois." That sounded almost as casual as my recent student who casually started a sen- tence with these words: 11 0ne day when I was flyi.ng over the North Pole. 11 The othei stt.dents looked at him questioningly, but with only a fracti.. on of the wonder that we country bumpkins felt when our own drummer spoke of places far away. And then there was our next neighbor, who is still alive and well at ninety-four. He had gone to the Panhandle of Texas 8.nd lived for some time, baclj: before I could remember, We listened to his jack rabbit, rattlesnake, sagebrush stories with wide-open eyes but ,secretly felt that he was kidding us merely because we had not been about. Such distances as he mentioned just could not be. We could look from our ovm yard and see hills three or four miles awa.y; imagine seelng forty miles avray! Why, that would be four times as far away as the distant county seat. Not more than one out of twenty gro,m people whom we knew had ever been that far away. I myself had never been more than fifteen miles away before I was eighteen, even though I had been about consider&bly. Puryear, Tennessee, w&s the extent of my far-w&ndering, to use a fine old word from our earli.e st English epic, BEOWULF. J·ust how big was the world, anyway, that our neighbor could see forty miles of it An all directions? Just before I left Fidelity, my cousin, who had recently been clear to California, came to visit us and took a whole evening teJ.li.ng rs o:f his adventvre, He had traveled by train, with stop- overs, clear to the end of creation. He had seen mountains more than fourteen thousand feet high(The highest poi.nt in the Jackson Purchase is less than 500 feet.), he had taken a ride on a ship to Catalina Island and had got seasick, he had throvm snowballs in mid- sunmier on one of hi.s mountain excursions.