The Old Language of the Ozarks - Danette House - Ep 24

Today's forest art here, and I always sputter and think of a better way to go once I get started.

I guess it's something we work on as we grow.

But I spend a lot of time thinking about the local history of the Ozarks.

Characters past long since or events that have long since taken place.

Or in the case of legends, maybe events that never happened at all.

It's a lovely, spicy, wonderfully intriguing place to live and to explore and to study.

And a lot of times we get so hung up on whether or not there were giants buried in a cave near Springfield or whether or not DeSoto left a mountain or a cave full of silver or gold on a mountaintop.

or whether or not the Yochums had them on mine and made dollars or not.

Those are all legends.

We think about those, and we think about ghosts and, you know, bank robberies and gunfights and all this sort of stuff, but we don't often think about the everyday things, the simple things, the common things.

We do and like the handicrafts of our ancestors.

It's a silver dollar city tour in a way.

Kind of get a glimpse maybe of how people lived.

But a lot of times we think about music or we think about quilts or we think about cookery or storytelling or any of the other hundred million things that come up that we lop into the Ben of Ozark culture.

But language, we don't think that much about language.

I don't think the everyday Ozarker considers how they speak or where it came from or how it's changed, even in

my short lifetime.

I

kind of consider myself fortunate to have experienced the very last of the children and grandchildren, maybe great-grandchildren, of the pioneers or first settlers of the Ozarks, those who'd heard those stories firsthand.

I only wish my attention span had been longer.

Isn't that always the way? Too

quick old, too late smart.

I butchered that, I think.

I don't think that's right.

It's a German proverb.