Old Uncle Crow

by Old Uncle Crow

Blow it out your ass! follows all of the same rules as the foregoing discussion of the construction up your hole!  The same distinctions apply also to the variant form:  blow it out of your ass! only excepting the necessary caveat that the latter is the intensive form. The only real distinction is that both forms are case specific in the way up yours & cet is not.  By this I am not referring to matters of grammar.  Rather, what I am telling you is that in the 1950s in rural Eagle Lake, MN, among male members of the so-called “Greatest Generation,” the phrase was used only antiphonally, and specifically in response to untimely instances of horn-blowing by other motorists, or “brain assholes.”

On car trips into Mankato, MN, as a small boy from the Summer of 1957 onward, I heard on different occasions both my late maternal uncle Emmett Jacobson, and his cousin Leland Jacobson, an ETO Artillery veteran, blare, “Blow it out your ASS!”  The occasion was one example or other of idiotic horn play by the comparatively languid, decadent and unalert, artless, Mankato City motorists of the day.

The first time I heard the variant used by my uncle Emmett Jacobson — “Blow it OUT of your ASS!” — was when he was startled by a sudden police siren as a Mankato patrolman pulled us over on a trumped up charge of passing on the shoulder, on our way up the Madison Avenue hill.  It was trumped up because my uncle’s attorney, Norman Nitzkowski, brought it out skillfully in court that the policeman had stopped us just as my uncle started to pass “the pain in the ass OLD sonofabitch” in front of us.  Only he never completed the pass, the charge was nuncupatory and bogus therefore.  And, Uncle Emmett laughed as he told me the story, “The judge was so God-damn mad at the cop for wasting the court’s time that he said ‘…and don’t come back in here, you brain asshole, until you’ve actually maybe SOLVED the God-damn crime for once FIRST!  Jesus Christ…!’”   

I did not incur any patental ire in this matter as by the time I’d first noticed the usage was in the Summer 0f 1957, a full year after I’d incorporated the usage up your hole! in my idiolect, and I was by now learning discretion.  The schoolyard of Minneapolis’s Minnehaha Elementary School at 40th Avenue South and East 52nd Street was, however, something of a hotbed of the invective of the male members of the Eagle Lake, MN, so-called “Greatest Generation.”  The only exception I know of being “Ma ” Ewert of rural LeRay Town, who used all these terms too and wore gloves and heaved sacks of feed around like any other farmer.

copyrighted by tio cuervo     April 28th, 2009