Redneck Tale # 64 – My Year 1611 vintage TV

Things are getting kinda desperate when you are reduced to laughing at something coming across on your dumb TV set - especially so when the program is not supposed to be approaching any kind of "funny." Maybe I might be forgiven if I explained that I had just finished up a big bowl of baked beans. They were not supposed to be funny, either, but beans have a way of doing things to a person.

I had been switching from TV channel to channel, looking in vain for something worth both listening to and watching at the same time. There went the 17^th re-run of that PBS show about the wolf packs in Yellowstone. Nope to that one. Then came an incomprehensible shoot-em-up about some cab driver with too much money getting himself wiped out to his personal disgust and to the relief of a whole flock of inept detectives who did not want to lose their jobs in today’s current disastrous job market. Then, because I am opposed to helping support monopolies and thus do not use cable TV, the next nine or 10 channels conversed in Spanish. That made it hard to choose between them as to which might be the viewingest or listeningest of the lot.

"Keep on channel-hopping, Gus"

Along came a bunch of religious program channels. I know not the names of the programs nor the religious proclivities espoused on them, but I really did enjoy the messages. I thought, "Home at last. Home at last. I have made it to the pinnacle." You can see, can’t you, that I was possessed of some of those feelings of exaltation.

The preacher was saying, "Harken unto me..."

I did not hear the rest of his spiel because I was out of there like a flash, running to get hold of my handy-dandy dictionary. (They have their wordbook and I have my wordbook, right?) "What is he saying we are supposed to do to him? What’s this ‘harken’ stuff? Is it clean or is it like what all of those pedophile priests have been getting in trouble for doing these past several years? ...Harken?"

Well, I couldn’t find where I had hidden my Webster’s, so it was back to channel flipping again.

The next channel brought another preacher guy into the room with me. This fellow was smaller and skinnier than was the first preacher, but he had what I like – a full-size Louisiana accent. He also had more energy than a hungry housefly. As he accented away, he danced and pranced all over a nifty platform that had been set up to look holier than the Christmas manger, but without all of those donkeys, goats, camels, or the Three Stooges in drag. I was somewhat hopeful that this preacher might also say something with "harken" in it, plus enough else such that I might get a handle on the meaning of that word. No such luck. He promised to explain something unintelligible that he had just then voiced, sort of Cajun style. He started off with the words, "Verily sayeth Samuel..."

That made me wonder if "verily" meant something like "loud," or maybe was the first name of someone known as "Verily Sayeth Samuel." (People were named differently back in the old days.)

Doggone it! Where’s that dictionary hiding, anyway?

Then I got to thinking, and that is something that is supposed to be fully and rapidly cured by watching TV. "I don’t need a dictionary. Those clowns need a dictionary!

There they are, costing donors tons of money to visit me in my sloth and sin and to speak sense into my laggardly ears. They are supposed to be making something better of me, if only making me a better donor than that which I was before they found me. bug-eyed, staring at the TV tube.

If I cannot understand what they are telling me, what is the good of all of their incessant preaching?

Well, I finally found out what those words meant.

"Harken" comes from the old and now discarded language of the Coptic folks, miles away from where I live and back in the early 1600s, too. It began as a saying heard most often during feasting times in the form, "Hark, the lark."

You will probably believe that you understand that old saying, 1600s-era Coptical though it may be.

You are mistaken. Back then, a lark was not a wee little bird. It was a biggie that honked, swam around in ponds and the like, and gave up its feathers to pillow-makers. When guests were asked what they'd prefer for a holiday meal, they would most often specify a lark. "Hark the lark" was Coptic talk for "Cook your goose."

Sayings change over the centuries. "Cook your goose" now means something quite different.

"Verily!"

I found out what "verily" means, even today. It is from the words of a song, and it is definitely not part of someone’s name as at first I had thought.

The song was being composed for advertising use by the large company that franchised palm-and-card-reading outlets. In those, the franchisees, practicing spiritualists and psychics all, solicited paying clients from off of the streets by playing music over loudspeakers installed above their doorways.

The franchisor's song composer needed to match the rhythm of his words with that of his music. (Catchy jingles make for busy businesses.) From what I read about this, the song writer worked on this project for years before realizing that the psychics and spiritualists were in the "dreams" business; that is, the franchisees' customers were dreaming if they thought that paying a card-reader real money might produce real results.

The jingle, thus, wound up as "Verily, verily, verily, verily – life is but a dream..."

I turned off the TV for the evening.