This short one-Act play is your mind bender for today. See if you can decode the pig latin phrases, do the math, think of more potato uses, and maybe tell me about the days in your youth when pig latin was your special way of communicating with your friends.
ACT I
[Hub and Roberta and the little twins from next door are sitting at the kitchen table after walking the dogs. Earlier Hub and Roberta picked all the potatoes.]
Hub: Woman, why do you always insist on planting so many potatoes?
Roberta: I want to make sure we won’t run out.
Hub: If we do, you can buy some. At the store, at the farmer’s market, at a neighbors.
Roberta: I don’t want to do that, it is too inconvenient. And they never taste the same. Rocks in the bags, tasteless, and smutty spots everywhere.
Hub: But look at all those potatoes. Did you do the math?
Roberta: Y—e—h. Three small pails per week, 36 weeks, 4 potato meals per week, 120 potato hills, averaging ¾ small pail per hill –oh, never mind – I did the math! And anyway, I need extra potatoes for days when I have company, for perogies, for potato bread, for soups, french fries, potato salads, and seed potatoes for next year. So, don’t even suggest it. There are NOT too many potatoes.
Hub: I suppose you’re right. We’ll also need some for Christmas decorations, dog toys, carved stamps for printing letters or logos on envelopes, dried potato heads, potato guns, for heartburn, and for batteries for my potato clock.
Little Twin Girl [with a broad smile]: ee-tay, ee-hay, ee-tay, ee-hay!
(She and her brother have been practicing their Pig Latin while we are on dog walks. And pretty much everything she says is in that dialect.)
______
I roared with laughter at that bit. But that is not all. I’m still laughing about Twin Boy’s antics when we were out walking the puppies. He tried to topple a dead tree and when it eventually came loose and he saw it was going to topple across the trail, he yelled:…. “imber-Tay!”
And to our astonishment, even though Hub’s attempts at Pig Latin are impossible to decode, and completely dyslectic, he scrambled out of the way with the rest of us. The twins told him they were “oud-pray” of his “a-way-om-cay-ish-lay-ent-may!”
Hub said when they left, “It’s too bad that the twins’ arents-pay and isters-say on’t-day owe-nay ow-hay uch-may un-fay ee-thay ins-tway are-way.”
I laughed and nodded.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Pig Latin Pulses
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
Holy Moley--you make piorogies too? We're just too much alike.
susan @ spinning
igpay atinlay was much harder for me than oppi goppi which I still use topodopaopy ;)
And I agree - you can never have too many potatoes! Great post.
susan, oh yes. Nothing beats "home-made" perogies for a quick, tasty, and fully satisfying meal. I may have mispelled the word but obviously you knew what I was referring to.
Hi pauline. You make me laugh. You are as much fun as the twins are.
I've never heard of "oppi goppi", and though I seriously puzzled over 'topodopaopy' (the word you provided), you're going to have to help me out here. What are the rules for converting English words to oppi goppi?
lol - the trick is to say "op" before every vowel
translated: thope tropick opis topo poput op bopefoporope opevoperopy vopowopel :)
Once those twins get going on this there will be no stopoppoping thopem!
That is so unny-fay Roberta. My twins had their own brand of pig latin when they were small...no one could decipher it for a while, but I started to catch on and they let me join their club. Ins-tway are the est-bay!
Thanks for that special heart-warming comment, joy. The one about the special relationship between you and your twins.
It is sweet to know that they allowed you into their elite club.
Wow, this took me back to boarding school where we deployed all the wit & resourcefulness that should have been going into English & Maths lessons into constructing increasingly obscure pig latin dicourses!
dick, your comment is so true. If I had applied myself as heartily to French and shorthand, and some other of school subjects, who knows how far I could have gone? But I won't sink into remorseful regret. So much of what I learned in school has no practical application in today's world but pig latin lives on.
Having said that, a neighbour, who is about fifty years old, mentioned to me the other day, that he finally made use of a lever and fulcrum to move some heavy planks in his yard and was delighted that the theory and practice of that difficult part of physics had eventually proved of practical use.
Of course now we think we're quite a team. He knows how to use a lever and fulcrum and I know how to speak pig latin.
Post a Comment