You May Take Candy From My Baby, Just Don’t Call Me a “Fredneck”

“The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.”  Edgar Allen Poe said that, but then he would know, wouldn’t he. The things we say and simultaneously don’t say fascinate me.  Mark Twain expressed a similar sentiment when he said “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening bug”.  And still I write, though clearly there is a part of me that is hesitant in my craft.  In looking for the proper quotations from Poe and Twain I ran across two others that I hadn’t read before, but both seem to confirm my hesitation.  Ira Gassen once said, “Be careful of your thoughts; they may become words at any moment.”, while Publilius Syrus is quoted as saying “Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so he is.”  If either these be true, I should simply learn to keep my fat mouth shut.  Still, it is words that consume my world.  The way they are used, misused, tortured and twisted.  The way so few can say so much and so many can say so little.  Often it is the most common of phrases that give me the greatest pause.  Perhaps it is my “off center” view of the world that leads me to these conclusions, but just the other day, one such phrase stuck with me and I have been pondering it ever since.

They say (whomever “they” happen to be), that some things are as “easy as taking candy from a baby”.  This phrase has probably been uttered in my presence a hundred or more times of the course of my existence on this earth, yet it wasn’t till recently that I took time to examine what it really means.  Of course it’s easy to take candy from a baby, in fact, I would wager that there isn’t anything in the world that is as easy.  Yet we still use this phrase, though the realities of it seem impossible.  Surely all tasks one might face would fail this test.  Could there be anything as easy?  That is the point of it though, isn’t it?  To convey ease?  Yet being such an unreasonable standard, why use it at all?  Wouldn’t the appropriate thing to say in all instances be that it will be “harder than taking candy from a baby”?  But then, we would be forced to examine just how much harder the task would be . . . a never ending measure that I for one couldn’t possibly quantify.  Where did this phrase originate?  And why did the baby have the candy to begin with?  Poor parenting?  Hard candy would seem a choking hazard and the sugars are certainly not good for developing teeth.  Maybe we are missing the point.  Maybe the presumption is that babies would like candy and thus hold onto it as something precious.  We all know the attention span of an infant is something akin to a squirrel on methamphetamines and simply obscuring an object from view will be quite sufficient to deny its existence in the infants world and soon enough the item will be completely forgotten.  So the candy must be clenched in the baby’s hand right?  And maybe, just maybe, we are talking about something that is actually quite difficult.  Any parent will tell you that trying to free anything from the robo-grip of tiny little fingers is like a feat in the World’s Strongest Man Contest.   They possess nearly super human strength and have absolutely no tactile discretion.  It is all or nothing.  I have been pinched on the cheek by both of my children when they were “babies” and it drew blood. 

So if we are now talking about an activity that is actually fairly difficult, perhaps when asked about one’s recovery from surgery or the exhaustion felt after an IRS tax audit, we should simply respond that “it was like taking candy from a baby . . . a real pain in the ass”.  At least in this way, you have some reasonable standard to measure by.  I may never know the answer, but I am going to continue to ask the question till I get an adequate explanation.  All this mental effort being given to the origins of a commonly used phrase got me thinking, how hard is it really to “coin” a word or phrase.  I have tried to drive things into the mainstream in the past with only limited success.  One year a friend and I tried to familiarize a euphemism for getting drunk at the holidays, something we called “hanging an ornament”.  It would go something like this:  “Boy, did you see Bob at the Christmas party last night?  He really hung an ornament in front of the whole company.  He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get fired.”  For some reason it never really took off.  Maybe it is like George Carlin said “I got a lot of ideas.  Problem is, most of them suck”.  Well, despite my prior failings, I would like to offer another one up for consideration:   “That guy is a real Fredneck”.  Now, I must admit that this one is fairly limited in usage, but I think it could really catch on.  As Americans we like to act as though we have a lock on the redneck population, but I am here to tell you that we are wrong.  The French have them too.  So what is the difference between an American redneck and a French one you ask?  Let me run it down for you:

The “Fredneck” is really not all that different from it’s North American cousin.  They enjoy an occasional Monster Truck rally (yes they have them here), they ridiculously bedazzle the most innocuous vehicle with “racing” stripes (recently saw a very square looking van that the owner must have mistaken for a Camaro), and they even love a good Carny (maybe a little TOO much in fact).  Sounds familiar enough, right?  So what is the difference?  It seems a simple matter of refinement and decorum.  The average “Fredneck” won’t drink themselves into a Nascar driven rage when a race finishes under caution, they are unlikely to put a spoiler where it doesn’t belong, and they don’t procreate just for the simple sake of doing so.  They are responsible and contributing members of society whose freak flag only flies when it doesn’t  interfere with the  normal functioning of society and more importantly, only when it is unlikely to offend anyone else.  Perhaps a better way to capture the essence of this is to throw a little Foxworthy at it.  “You might be a Fredneck if . . .”  If you prefer to drink a single bottle of beer rather than a single glass of wine with your meal . . . You might be a Fredneck.  If you have the faintest clue what an "achy breaky heart" is from watching lost episodes of Hannah Montana instead of the 7 hour news marathon playing on every other channel . . . You might be a Fredneck.  If you refer to McDonald's food with anything other than contempt and disgust while in mixed company . . . You might be a Fredneck.  If you wear a baseball cap and jogging shoes . . . EVER . . . you might be a Fredneck.  So, you see, we aren't really that different after all.  Vive La France and God Bless America, now let's have some BBQ!

So there you have it, my latest literary masterpiece and contribution to modern society. Maybe my beloved Robert Frost was right when he said “Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.” Perhaps I fall within the latter. Until next time. R.