Whistledicks and Conniption Fits
Old Kadizzle will soon be heading back to the hills of West Virginia, and it has me thinking about the colorful characters and even more colorful language I grew up with.
My brother and I spent many hot summer days putting up hay for an old hill farmer named Lutrel Davis. Lutrel owned the kind of country store you hardly see anymore. There was a pot-bellied stove where the old-timers gathered to swap stories, solve the world's problems, and invent a few new ones. If you wanted to learn the mountain vocabulary, all you had to do was pull up a chair.
Lutrel had a favorite word that always made me laugh.
"Whistledick."
He used it to describe someone who wasn't exactly blessed with an abundance of common sense. Nobody seems to know where the word came from, but folks in the hills always knew exactly what it meant.
That sent Kadizzle down the rabbit hole looking up old Appalachian expressions. Along the way I stumbled across another classic: conniption fit—a dramatic outburst of anger when someone doesn't get their way.
Then it hit me.
Those two old mountain expressions came together perfectly at the last Payson Town Council meeting.
Councilman Jim Ferris threw what can only be described as a first-class conniption fit after his latest attempt to defund the library went nowhere. When the votes didn't go his way, he stormed out of the meeting and slammed the door behind him.
Back in Lutrel Davis's country store, the old-timers would have smiled, nodded, and said, "Looks like that whistledick just had himself a conniption fit."
Some words never go out of style.
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