I know you are but what am I?

When I first moved to South Carolina almost 11 years ago, I really hadn’t prepared myself linguistically for what was to come. I mean, I spoke fluent German, I spoke fluent English, what else did I need to know?

I think “y’all” was the first new word to enter my vocabulary. I prefer it actually to what I was saying before: “you guys”. I actually think “y’all” is a more progressive form of address, you know, gender neutral and everything. After “y’all” came “cut on the light” and “mash the button” and “iddn’t” instead of “isn’t” and various other interesting twists on the English of our forefathers, some of which I found more useful than others.

But one day, about 3 or 4 months after I moved to the Upstate, I was standing on my driveway helping a friend load some things into her car. I asked her a question and she stopped what she was doing, looked at me and said “Do what?”.

Uh, what? I just stared at her. I had absolutely no idea what that meant. “Do what?”. I didn’t even know what the proper response was to that question. Was it some sort of game I didn’t know the rules for? What’s the answer to “Do what?”??? And for a brief moment I panicked. It was a total conversation killer. Finally I just sort of stuttered “W-w-what?”.

Well, yesterday I had a similar experience. At the very least it drudged up that same feeling of not knowing how to counter, to be linguistically incapable of response, to panic because you really needed more time to research the query, statement, whatever before you provided an adequate snappy retort, if indeed a snappy retort is what the question called for. I mean you don’t want to get snippy with someone who may have just complimented you, right?

Yesterday, someone called me “ARTSY-FARTSY”.

Shut up! I am not!

Um, thank you?

Sticks and stones blah blah blah

“Artsy-Fartsy”? What’s that supposed to mean? Is it a compliment? Is it an insult? Is it neither?

Well I knew it couldn’t be a compliment. Nothing as patronizingly diminutively cute as “artsy fartsy” could possibly be a compliment. Plus, you know, it includes the synonym for passing gas. “Artsy” sounds nice. But “artsy-fartsy” not so much. So compliment was out. That left me with insult or neither.

So I decided to look it up and here’s what I found. According to www.yourdictionary.com, this is what it means:

artsy-fartsy (ärt′sē färt′sē)

adjective

Slang pretentiously artistic, sophisticated, etc.

also arty-farty art′y-fart′y (ärt′ē färt′ē)

Ah, so artistic and sophisticated I’m okay with, but “pretentiously” artistic and sophisticated, I don’t think so. So I continued looking. According to www.thefreedictionary.com, artsy-fartsy is defined as such:

art·sy-fart·sy (ärts-färts)

adj. Vulgar

Pretentiously or affectedly artistic.

Um, there’s that P word again, and now “affected”, not to mention that the entire word is defined as Vulgar. This is starting to go downhill fast. Maybe it’s internet bias. Perhaps printed sources, such as real books might provide something a little bit less “not on my side”. So here goes:

ARTSY-FARTSY - "adj.; having an affinity for arty things. (U.S. slang, mid 1900s)" From "Slang and Euphemism: A Dictionary of Oaths, Curses, Insults, Ethnic Slurs, Sexual Slang and Metaphor, Drug Talk, College Lingo and Related Matters" by Richard A. Spears (New American Library, Penguin Putnam, New York, Third Edition, 2001)

Okay first off, what are arty things? And secondly why is this included in a dictionary of “insults, ethnic slurs, drug talk and related manners”???? At least it didn’t say anything about affection or pretention. So I looked a bit further:

artsy-fartsy
adjective (artsy-farts, ier)

1. (colloquial) A frivolous or dismissive description of someone or something that is artistic or pretentiously artistic.

Now this one I can live with. And as much as I suspected, the term “artsy-fartsy” may have more to do with the person who uses the word than the person they are attempting to describe. I enjoy this definition, as much as one can enjoy a definition. Maybe in calling me “artsy-fartsy”, this person (who is a friend who is not involved in the arts nor claims to understand the fascination with it) was simply being “dismissive” of a part of me, an interest I share with others, that he/she didn’t really understand. And in doing so, I’m sure they meant no harm, hence the moniker being “frivolous”. The “pretentious” part is still in the definition, but at least it gives the option of being “artistic OR pretentiously artistic”. Never before have I hung on two simple letters so desperately.

So, compliment or insult or neither? I’m going with neither.

Alright, now if you’ll excuse me I have a Metropolitan Opera live feed to watch on my large screen plasma TV, which is located in the pottery studio I had especially built with a state of the art kiln. Now if I could just get the cork out of this bottle of Dom, I could probably finally turn my attention to the private ballet training session I have with the instructor I flew in from the Bolshoi Ballet

Ciao!