TOOTIE-HEADS

When our granddaughter was in kindergarten she returned home one day ashen-faced.

“Something happened,” she told her mother. “It’s so bad I can’t tell you.”

“No, that’s okay. It’s always okay to tell your mother.

“Louis said something.”

“What?”

She whispered. “He called Alan a tootie-head.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know, but it must be bad, because Teacher sent him to the principal’s office, and he never came back.”

At this point, should I explain what tootie-head means, or let you figure it out for yourself?

That’s always an issue for an author. Not everyone who reads a piece knows all the meanings. Like most old people, I now read in the areas of sociobiology, brain research, and quantum field theory. None of them are my native tongue. I appreciate it when Wilson or Koku or Carroll explains a term. I’m also aware that they can’t do every one, that I, as the reader, have to make some assumptions, or do some dictionary work.

Lindsay Faye, in her Seven for a Secret, provides a helpful glossary to the lingo of Irish immigrants and the newly-founded police force, the copper stars, and the criminal underworld in 1840s NYC. I did a glossary for my The Strange Calling. A glossary is one answer if you are writing technically, or in fiction, in an area where it is not reasonable for the average reader to understand.

I have recently read James Joyce’s Dubliners, his first book, short stories of the Dublin of a century ago. Now only is the language 100 years old, but much of it is Irish slang of the time. I get enough of it, though, to feel the poignancy of these stories.

So, explain tootie-head or not? I think I’ll let you figure it out.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Daughter Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in America will be published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press, in 2016.

My novel, VETS, about four handicapped and homeless Iraqistan veterans who are accused of murdering a VA doctor, will be published by Black Opal Books in 2015.

In case you missed it, a Tweet Repeat: Not everyone will be cured, but everyone can be healed.

I tweet as yooper1721.

I also write Christ In Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/

A PLUG FOR ONE OF MY OTHER BOOKS:

NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them [AndrewsMcMeel & HarperAudio, with Czech and Japanese translations] Paul K. Hamilton, MD, the co-founder of CanSurmount, called it “The best book for cancer patients, by a cancer patient, ever.”