My husband, Frank, has a bulky blue cooler he keeps around in case we go on any outings that require cold beverages. Beach days, picnics, that sort of thing.
When we lived in New York City I was a strong advocate for getting rid of the cooler because it took up precious closet space that could have gone to items more frequently in use, such as our clothes. Frank put the cooler into action maybe four times a year, and I did not feel that was enough to justify its continued presence in our home, given the size of our home at the time (small).
But Frank is stubborn and I am ineffectual, so the cooler remained. It bothers me less now that we live in a larger apartment, though I still say our picnicking needs, such as they are, would be better served by one of those wicker baskets that comes with all the dining accessories built in.
We wouldn’t use the wicker set any more often than the plastic cooler, but at least the wicker set would be cuter.
For family vacations on the Florida Panhandle when I was a kid, we’d bring along our own plastic cooler for beach days, ensuring that we’d have a supply of oversweetened soft drinks to refresh us as we lazed in the hot sun. When referring to the cooler, my father always said “coolah” in a deep voice, presumably for comedic effect, though I never got why that was supposed to be funny.
He has a lot of those semi-humorous intentional mispronunciations. On those very same beach vacations, for instance, we would apply this sunscreen that was, per the label, for “faces and tender places” or some such. My dad took to calling the bottle “face’tiz and place’tiz.”
I know the origin of that one. My grandmothers on both sides pronounced the word “once” with an extraneous “t” at the end, as in, “Once’t upon a time …”
That inspired Dad to begin adding “t”s to pretty much any word ending in “-ce.” Hence (hence’t?) “face’tiz” and “place’tiz,” which of course demonstrate the plural form.
My own contribution to this lunacy was to adapt, some years later, the lyrics to a Commodores song thusly:
You're once't
Twice't
Three times't a lady
And yes, I know I broke the rule about only using “-ce” words.
In many cases, Dad’s mispronunciations started out as jokes but over time became his default way of saying the words in question. And I was left to wonder, Are you still making fun of saying the word that way? Or do you just say the word that way now?
One Sunday after church when I was a teenager, I was standing next to my father as he was having a conversation with someone about pets. And Dad goes, “Have you thought about a feesh?”
The person he was talking to couldn’t possibly know that the last word of that question was a humorous reference to the way my grandmother—Dad’s mother—said “fish.” And Dad didn’t offer an explanation, either.
So for this other parishioner, who was just trying to share her puppy-training woes or whatever, my dad was a person who said “feesh” with no discernible irony. Which I guess, by then, was the truth.
I have a theory that this is how the Southern accent came into being. We all started talking funny for kicks, but we kept it up too long, and now none of us remembers how to say a diphthong right.
Indirect Objects 