The Dickens!

My leg hurts like the dickens today, and I've crossed a new boundary in my experience with illness: I've actually taken a Vicodin before coffee. This makes me feel like a lowly moral coward. A lowly moral coward without a deep stabbing pain in my leg, but a lowly moral coward anyway.

But what is a dickens? All my life I've enjoyed picking up odd non-standard words from people around me. One of my favorites was jag. My dad would say "Let's go get a jag of dirt," where jag was synonymous with truckload. Curiously, there didn't seem to be a half-jag or a quarter-jag. Nor could one have a jag of, say, lumber or scrap iron. Only dirt and gravel constituted a jag, and any quantity thereof was a full jag.

Another one that I like, simply because of the way it rolls off the tongue, came from my Uncle Bob in Iowa, when he would refer to a direction as caddywampus. "You head caddywampus across that field," meaning go across that field cross-wise at some arbitrary angle. He also once referred to a badly twisted barn as being caddywampus, which suggested that the word had more utility than you'd think and could be applied to something that had been cruelly twisted out of useful shape. (Stephen King uses the word widdershins to convey the same idea, but I contend that a widdershins sounds like some kind of gelatinous mollusc that lives in glorious but constrained majesty in some ghastly Maine tidepool before its cold, gooey life is snuffed out by something even nastier.)

My grampa was occasionally agin the idea. That's what he would say. "I'm agin the idea," though it was not always clear exactly what the idea was. He often said it to himself while scrawling a disorienting network of lines, dashes and squiggles on a piece of steel plate with a soapstone. If he was in a hurry, he was merely agin it.

But yeah. My leg's gone all caddywampus, as though I've been hauling jags of dirt, and I'm agin the idea.