I love listening to others talk, especially when I can actually hear them.
The articulate verses the urban…sounds of slang and what’s correct.
Often a word jumps out, getting my attention like this morning, eavesdropping on a burly fellow in a peacoat and a Patriots hat talk about the Super Bowl.
He said with great pride,”Chaff, those fucken Falcons…all chaff, with that 28 point lead…the arrogant fucks. But we won goddammit cause we’re the Patriots, mother fucka…we had more heart.”
His four-letter words rained upon me, but they weren’t what turned my head.
Chaff…the word chaff, shimmied into my senses like a hula girl.
A noun, meaning…the husks of corn or other seed separated by winnowing or threshing…chopped hay and straw used as feed, or fodder.
But there’s another meaning for chaff…trash, garbage, schlock and crap, which clearly applied to our braying patriot’s feeling towards the fallen Falcons.
To distinguish valuable people or things from worthless ones in this case, on a playing field.
It also represents, good-natured banter, repartee, ribbing and wisecracks.
Or as a verb, chaffing…making fun of, poking fun at, making sport of your friends.
You don’t always find a word that can be used both negatively, turned inside out, into a positive spin.
Separating the wheat from the chaff…hulking the husks, stripping it’s shell. One could say, their critic was flaying the Falcons down the middle, ridding them of their swagger and pluck.
Chaff…what a fine word to learn amid all that bravado, sandwiched in between so many fucks, separating the chaff from the grain, holding it up, like a perfect stalk of wheat.
Ah…isn’t language lovely?
Where would we be without it?
Fucken A.
SB
Agricultural metaphor. Gotta love it in age when humans are being removed from the land and relationship with mother earth. The first agrarians and farmers always learn from diplomatic relations with the local indigenous. Politicians and bankers just do the organizing for us…. and take the children (sometimes still unborn) as insurance or downpayment on all the thinking they are going to do for us.
Fore thought…. prometheus stole fire xx
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He stole fire from Zeus. Brave man.
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I always liked that expression… sorting the wheat from the chaff
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It’s my new word. Chaff…:)
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You always seem to make silk from a sows ear Susannah. I never would have gotten as much from that one sided conversation as you did! ~Elle
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He was bigger than life.
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I’m stunned that you would find that word in such a limited vocabulary.
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Urban language, meaning what you just said…limited…has many words like chaff. It’s a parlance onto itself. He was a big, beefy football fan who wore the word chaff like another gold chain, and he had quite a few of those. He was attention grabbing alright.
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Adding “fuck” as a sentence enhancer really brought the word “chaff” to the surface … or is that just me?
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That’s so funny. You kill me.
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As I read your post and came to ‘chaff’ I automatically heard it with an English accent. Don’t know why. I then proceeded to give his entire shout-out an accent.
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That’s funny.
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Agriculture is the seat of civilization, so it’s not surprising that its argot sits central in our language. There are so many examples: “some fell on stony ground”, “ploughing an arid furrow”, “a harrowing experience”, “reap what you sow”, “make hay whilst the sun shines”.
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Well said.
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