Doreen Michele

I was probably eighteen years old. I say that because this conversation happened in my friend's car and that most likely means she had picked me up to take me to college. My dad was twelve years older than my mom and when they first got together, he would go to the field for his job and  put his car on blocks before leaving. She didn't have a driver's license. So she took classes and got her license while he was gone and then years later their son  had a driver's license the nanosecond he turned sixteen and their daughters both physically moved out and owned a vehicle before getting a license because in some ways my family is the most sexist pig that ever did pig. So when I was eighteen, my mother gave gas money to a friend who lived nearby to take me to school with her rather than, you know, get me a driver's license. And that explanation is an example of how my mind organizes information: We had this conversation in her car, so I was probably eighteen because REA...

All y'all is a Southern expression inclusive of myriad groups of peoples. Y'all is just plural to distinguish it from singular you. I'm struggling here to explain it because historically English had thee and thou but that wasn't singular versus plural you. It was intimate versus formal you. Tu in French is a close friend or similar. Vous is someone you don't know well. The word they can be used in singular form as a gender neutral version of he or she if being gender neutral matters more than grammatical agreement on singular versus plural. It's generally less awkward than trying to use the word one  which sounds stiff and formal and folks don't much use that construction. In the South, generally speaking: You = just one person that I'm speaking to. Y'all = a group of folks I'm addressing who likely identify as a group, such as members of the same family or members of the football team. All y'all  = a group of groups, inclusive of many dem...

My maiden name is Irish in origin and I realized in recent months at the age of sixty that my Irish heritage was in some sense treated more secretly than my Cherokee heritage. My mother was a German immigrant who grew up in Germany during World War II and its aftermath. My father spent 18.5 years of his 26.5 years of military service overseas, possibly in part because it was easier for him to be White passing as a foreigner. I was molested as a child. I grew up in a family haunted by "dirty secrets" many of which were dirt from other people, from a larger context, from a racist society and from a world unable to heal up in the face of wars and other large scale problems individuals typically don't know how to adequately navigate. We fight over an offense we did not give against those who were not alive to be offended. While poor, I sometimes experienced abusive behavior from Black Americans thrilled to take their anger out on a White woman they thought was beref...

Grandfathered in is a phrase from the ugly post-Civil War Jim Crow era in the Deep South that refers to efforts to legally protect the rights of White people while denying newly freed Blacks voting rights.  They passed a law saying illiterate people couldn't vote knowing most newly freed slaves were illiterate because it had been illegal for slaves to learn to read. They then added a clause saying "You can still vote even if you are illiterate if your grandfather could vote." This meant dirt poor illiterate White people were likely to qualify for the right to vote but no newly freed slaves would pass this test granting an exception for illiterate Whites. Their grandfathers were likely slaves (or rapey White slave owners not admitting to being the father, but that detail is something newly freed slaves were unlikely to argue in a court of law at that time). That's from a piece called Rotten to the Core on Eclogiselle and you may wish to read it because it says more...

I have achieved my lifelong dream of being FREE to open my big fat mouth in public and speak my mind as I see fit without consequence though I'm sometimes perceived as rude, crude and socially unacceptable and I'm generally too truthful to be good. All you have to do is leave all social media, have no traffic, no engagement and no audience and THEN you can say ANYTHING you want! You have no idea how hard I have worked for years and years to reach this glorious plateau. Wow, what rarified air!

Michael Stipe, lead singer for R.E.M., has said the song is not about religion. The phrase is a Southern expression and I think it's probably more or less a polite euphemism for losing my shit. Since writing that piece, it has occurred to me it probably also means forgetting my manners . The Deep South is very religious and famously polite as Ugly Americans go and religion and manners are seen as related in the Deep South. So I think one meaning for the phrase is getting so upset with someone you fail to be polite and respectful as is generally expected from people where I come from. You drop your Sunday Best behavior and go off on someone.

I wrote a post called Dagu Dagu Dagu . Dagu is a word from some African language and probably the best English explanation is "spreading news by word of mouth." You might translate it as "the grapevine." I don't even know which African language it's from. I just know trivia about language sticks with me, so I'm a wealth of knowledge about language, yet wholly incapable of speaking anything fluently, often English included. I'm medically handicapped and sometimes just sound like a blithering idiot. If I'm physically stressed out enough, I lapse into German -- though my German is TERRIBLE -- and I sometimes CAN'T speak English for an hour or so. I've made a few stabs at talking about my relationship to language learning and recently tried to make a compendium of that here . I'm going to try again to give people some idea of how I'm a sponge for language stuff yet I'm not fluent in anything, probably not even English. I grew up i...