The Absent Uncle: Some words I remember

Over the weekend I was texting with an old friend (yes, some 70-something-old guys text – regularly) and he used a word I just hadn’t heard/read in a long time.

He was giving me his reaction to a ruling made in a baseball game that I had brought his attention to, and after giving it some investigation and thought, he agreed, and in his words the ruling was “just foolishness”.

In his eyes, the ruling was not wrong (per the written rules), was not incorrectly called (“the umps blew it”), no, his assessment was the ruling was “just foolishness”.

The memories tumbled from my brain cell filing cabinets full of old conversations, overheard judgements, and the usage of “foolishness”.

Most of those memories take me back to my mother and her mother (my grandma). Foolishness was a brand to be applied to those people whose action didn’t do the logical thing (in their eyes), or had been like a salmon swimming upstream did something they just couldn’t comprehend.

I heard “foolishness” a lot. My clearest memories were often times in relation to decisions I made regarding purchases, usage of time, or other issues that needed to be rethought  in their judgement. Once in a while the word “pure” was put in front of foolishness to denote the severity of the judgement. There was an incremental increase in severity of judgement after that.

There was a narrow demarcation between foolishness, pure foolishness, and just plain stupid. Foolishness was better. Foolishness can be theoretically corrected, just plain stupid was a total loss. 

Please don’t misunderstand; these two women played a huge part in my life, helping me to understand making decisions about what is “foolishness” and what is “just plain stupid”. 

Words to remember.