I Need Access To The OED.

Local Girl caught me by surprise when she noticed what she thought was a familial glitch in our otherwise mostly upstandingly correct use of the English. It made her cringe to hear us use it, as it was one of those ways that hill-jacks (is this hyphenated?) and toddlers abuse the language. By copying from another area of English. Inadvertently wrongly.

Boughten. Milk not derived from the cows out back is most likely boughten. This gingham dress was not boughten; I sewed it myself.
Created out of need, because “bread I did buy at the store” is clumsy as a two legged giraffe.
When she told me this was improper English, I at first did believe her, believe that we were perhaps the unsophisticated hicks we pretend so hard not to be. It’s a pretty silly word. I was worried mostly by the fact that I’d never noticed anyone use it, or be offended by its casual usage.

For days this did nag me. Tonight the usually unreliable dictionary dot com assuaged my misplaced fears. The American Heritage Dictionary has this to say:

bought·en (bôt n)
v.
A past participle of buy.

adj.
1 Commercially made; purchased, as opposed to homemade: boughten bread.
2 Artificial; false. Used of teeth.

But the interesting part was an attached regional disclaimer:

American regional dialects allow freer adjectival use of certain past participles of verbs than does Standard English. Time-honored examples are boughten (chiefly Northern U.S.) and bought (chiefly Southern U.S.) to mean “purchased rather than homemade”…The Northern form boughten (as in store boughten) features the participial ending -en, added to bought, the participial form, probably by analogy with more common participial adjectives such as frozen.

Disclaimer: I believe that Local Girl learned to speak mainly from her mother, who is a Southern Lady, and was therefore listening with a tainted ear for these parts. Her reach for correctness extends to ending sentences prepositionally.

More to read via the Wikipedia: linguistic prescription.

Stench of Give Up.

*sigh* So much for my distaste of going meta (self referencing).
The farm hasn’t been mine since my Dad got out. The lack of responsibility for it has severely weakened my blogging resolve. I’m now literally just a farm hand. After a year of doing this from my perspective as a know-nothing farmer, the writing of goings on just ain’t the same.

I don’t know in what direction this blog will go. Rather than decide, I’m going to put some stuff up. See what happens.

Game Of The Century.

Greatest football rivalry of all time.
Buckeyes v Wolverines.
University of Michigan v The Ohio State University.
Scarlet v Blue.
Hail to the Victors v Buckeye Battle Cry.

And for the first time ever, #1 v #2.
Saturday 3:30 EST

It’s crazy time.

Here’s the itinerary as of now:
Thursday night is jumping into Mirror Lake.
Early early Friday morning is the Breakfast Club.
Friday night is the Hate Michigan Rally featuring The Dead Schembechlers (embedded music).
Saturday, naturally, is the game.

The Village Drunkherd.

This last summer was hay-poor. But quite corn-rich. The sea slug (bag of corn silage) from last winter has become three sea slugs. Silage has to sit for at least three weeks after being put in the bag, to rot properly. The calves we started feeding this week. The cows, last week.

Red was being harassed by the other cows as she tried to feed at the silage bag. She was shoved down, kicked, stuck in the mud. My dad when up with hip-lifters and pulled her out. As soon as she was on her own four feet again a larger cow ran up and butted her back down. We moved to her own pasture. Soon we added another victim of the cow bullies. This one was knocked around till she was limping.

When ever we drive up the drive, the cows go nuts. Kicking up their heels and running. Half and three-quarter ton animals don’t run real graceful. It’s more of a lunging sprint. For about 100 feet. And then they stop and pant and froth at the mouth. It’s not too good for them, they normally do it only when very excited or scared.

My Aunt took these two things, the aggressiveness and the bug-eyed nutty actions and figured out what’s been going on.
Our cows are drunk.
It’s real simple. Grain sugars in a controlled rot become alcohol. The sugar in the corn in the bag ferments as it’s supposed to. At certain points this becomes concentrated to the point that our cows would not be allowed to drive. Or operate heavy machinery.

Ed Wood.

Now is the winter of my wood.

Come late October, not much needs done on the farm, farming-wise. Things need fixing, yeah, but crops don’t need cared for and no one is giving birth on purpose. The beefs just need enough sustenance to stay healthy and alive.
So we find other ways to occupy our time. Given the chance I’d probably sleep in and lounge about and play golf on the computer and read. My dad’s favorite time-eater is gathering firewood.

This is a pile of firewood.

This is a pile of firewood two days past that last pile. This picture is three days old. The pile is much bigger now.
People still heat their homes (or shop or garage as often as, now) with wood. It’s a shock, I know, but there it is. Up until this last winter, my parents home was always heated with wood. Our farm has three little woods lingering about the edges. The main woods we had logged out to finance my dad’s airplane. Loggers take logs. Loggers leave treetops. Free wood for the taking. We bought a small bit of land that adjoined ours. Mostly it was awful fields, but also included was a tiny bit of woods that had been utterly raped by other loggers. Who left the tops.

This is what we are cutting and splitting. And selling. It takes up about 4 hours of the day, six days a week, barring inclement weather.