I am just pork with delusions of grandeur

Each of the lyrics comes from an old-time hickory song for fiddles, and is a lyric from that corresponding song.

"Fire on the Mountain" --> "Fire on the Mountain, run boys run"

Fire On The Mountain - Fiddle Player POV

"The House of the Rising Sun" --> "The Devil's in the house of the rising sun"

House of the Rising Sun

"Ida Red" --> "Chicken in the bread pan peckin' out dough"

Ida Red - Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys

"Granny Will Your Dog Bite" --> "Granny does your dog bite? 'No child, no'."

FTC #149 Granny Will Your Dog Bite

And for your furthered education, The Mountain Whipporwill.

in a time before things like radios and record players, every time you heard music was because there was somebody in the room with you playing an instrument. and many, many, many social events involved dancing, which requires music. so, if you're planning any kind of gathering in the american south or appalachia, you need to find a fiddler. and the fiddler's job is to play music that everybody knows and likes and can dance to.

the mistake The Devil makes in his bet with Johnny is that he misinterprets the contest as being about technical ability, so he has this big flashy song. he plays fast and impressively with a band of demons playing unfamiliar instruments in unfamiliar rhythms. he's definitely more skilled at playing than Johnny, and thinks he has it in the bag.

Started stitching the Milky Way in. Slowly making progress on it as I am hiding the travelling thread so the back will look nice.

Progress on the constellation quilt has come along quite a lot now. Finished the binding on the quilt over the weekend. I prefer to machine stitch the binding to the front then hand stitch the back side. It gives such a nice finish to the quilt. Took the time to measure it also and it ended up being 72" by 72" (183cm by 183cm).

Behold the stars of the constellations of the northern sky! I love how this quilt has turned out. It was a lot of fun to work on and the effect is so cool in person. Overall I would estimate it took about 90-100 hours to complete. Give or take 10 hours if you want to count the time I spent custom dying the fabric.

I made sure to get a nice photo of it in daylight. For once I also remembered to get a quilt label on it. The back really shows the difference in readability of the quilting on the ice dyed fabric compared to the solid front. Thank you everyone that has followed this. I am glad you all found joy in it.

like, the concept being, people are familiar with the phrase and what people use it to mean metaphorically, but it’s not common knowledge anymore what the metaphor was in literal reference to. people still say “toe the line” but don’t necessarily conjure up the image of people standing at the starting line of a race, forbidden from crossing over it. people still say “the cat is out of the bag” without necessarily knowing it’s a sailors’ expression referring to a whip being brought out for punishment. some metaphors are so dead we don’t even know where they come from; like, there are ideas about what “by hook or by crook” references, but no one is entirely sure. nobody knows what the whole nine yards are.

and then you throw in a malaprop or a mondegreen or two, where because people don’t know what the actual words of the expression refer to, they’re liable to replace them with similar sounding words (see “lack toast and tolerant”). so we can literally go from a phrase referencing a common, everyday part of life to a set of unfixed, contextless sounds with a completely different meaning. that’s fascinating. what an interesting piece of the way language and culture are living, changing, coevolving things.

maybe part of the reason we can’t figure out where some phrases come from is that over time the words themselves have changed! one of the theories about “the whole nine yards” is that it’s a variant of “the whole ball of wax,” which some people further theorize was originally “the whole bailiwick,” meaning just “the whole area”! the addition of “nine yards” might be related to “dressed to the nines,” which might reference the fucking Greek muses! language is so weird and cool! (and I only know any idioms in two languages!)

a hare’s breath is small in a completely different way than a hair’s breadth and works very differently as a unit of distance.

according to that author, “whole nine yards” is hotly debated with a few more-modern popular origins; such as the length of ammunition within a WWII gun (but it most likely is more modern than ancient greece - the first use i can find of the term is in 1855).

however, the author favored a more simple, textile explanation (which i in turn also favor): when you go to a clothing store, they measure out your purchase in yards in front of you. i am not a seamstress, but google says that an everyday dress can take between 5-7 yards, whereas a fancy ballgown can take 8-10. asking for the “whole nine yards” is twofold: it both assumes you’re going to be making something big and fancy, and it is making sure you don’t get shortchanged by the fabric merchant (literally receiving the entire nine yards you are asking for). and although unsubstantiated, i wonder if it might be part of where we get the term “dressing to the nines” from as well - you are so fancy-dressed, you need nine yards of fabric.

i feel strongly this is backed up by the “ball of wax” connection as well; since (like you said!!!) there’s historical precedent that “ball of wax” as an idiom “most likely [is] a mondegreen of the idiom the whole bailiwick, meaning the whole territory.” (It also connects with a 17th century practice of dividing territory amongst heirs). but if whole ball of wax means the entire territory, doesn’t it make sense that whole nine yards would also mean a legitimate and tactile nine whole yards of fabric? doesn’t it make sense that we would smoosh together the meaning of “whole territory” with “whole piece of cloth”? i don’t know, i like that idea :)

additionally - just in the evidence? one of the first uses of the term “the whole nine yards” is the following line from a woman complaining in a 1855 news article: “[…] I told her to get just enough to make three shirts; instead of making three, she has put the whole nine yards into one shirt!“ 

i have loved doing this research with y'all, thank you for listening. but i do just want to say - sometimes, the practice of linguistics shows us places where people have been silenced or devalued. there’s something here about the silent history of working-class people and of women’s work specifically - that it usually takes some digging before people consider that women and (worse! alas! a working woman!) seamstresses might be the ones who coined a very-popular term. in a lot of the articles i read for this essay, the first assumptions were that men (men in war, men on boats) had to have coined the term, even when it didn’t make any real sense. there is a very normal and even very likely reason for this term - and still, people are baffled by it, just because men don’t know where it could have come from.

and i think, to your point beforehand - how interesting, when idioms show us the places that we have been able to cover up and forget about. what makes something dead? i have no idea where the word podcast comes from, but the boomers were horrified when kids didn’t know why the save button is a floppy disc. that word i used up there, mondegreen? it was coined by Sylvia Wright. i have no idea who coined your guess is as good as mine and i have used it within the last 2 hours.

and, like, on a less serious note - do you know how long it took before i learned it’s actually spelled bury the lede? and like, i have always been honest about this, but when i was younger i thought a ”garden-variety longhair cat“ meant literally a variety of cat related to the garden.

so, yeah!!! a little bit of joy. i love so many things about this, about this discussion - across all of time and space and the internet, we get so freakin’ excited about words. and sometimes it makes us think about a bolt of cloth passing over someone’s hands. and then sometimes, there’s this really beautiful moment where something is just-as-true-now as it was back in 1855. we still measure out our fabric in yards in front of the customer. the person on the other side of the counter still has to prove it’s all nine yards.

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

"euthanasiac" by Daffodil @hoofweed is live on our website 🪻 "when you do it, try to not look me in the eyes as the life leaves them. do not let the flies linger on me. you know i spent my time flicking them away."

read the full poem now:

1. Check that you have good access to shade trees, a shelter custom made to fit you and all your friends, and plenty of good airflow

2. Find the hottest, sunniest, and least windy part of you pasture and lay down

3. Make sure you look as much as possible like you have died of heatstroke

4. Get your friends in on it

made a fat honse! pattern by makeshiftwings :D