all the betitted women, all the embosomed girls,
hippy-hippy-hippy shake me to my foundations as i walk,
to my roots while i stroll.
all the betwittering schoolgirls, all the emblazoning matrons,
swishers of sashays this way and that way,
slackening, skirting, bloused unto perfection.
all the bare-legged havens, all the hosieried homes,
dizzy me to staggering in this heat.
i duck inside to air-conditions, where i watch the walls and scrawl.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“The American is not, in truth, lacking in a capacity for discipline; he has it highly developed; he submits to leadership readily, and even to tyranny. But, by a curious twist, it is not the leadership that is old and decorous that fetches him, but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of economics, religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new metaphor or piece of slang. Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meet the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative.” – H.L. Mencken, The American Language