Fiction Daily

FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING

All week it seems I’ve constantly had something to do next … meetings, phone interviews, bills, dogs to walk.

Because traditionally it’s hard for me to get anywhere on time, I usually feel anxious when I have an appointment.

As I was washing the dishes rapidly before leaving … that’s one of the reasons for being late; the house should be neat before I shut the door … a childhood memory came clearly to mind of a phrase my mother used all the time.

I was in a swivet.

Can this be a real word? I wondered. Or is it just a cooked-up family expression?

Real, it is. And it may be a word that was brand-new in my grandmother’s time, meaning that my mom may have been a second-generation user of the word.

Swivet means a fluster or panic. The origin is unknown, but believed to be late 19th-century. That means my great-grandfather would have been among the first to hear it used, possibly with my grandmother, who laid it on my mom, who used it with me.

Now you might say, why be in a swivet, when you can be in a tizzy?

A tizzy has a slightly different sense of being in a state of nervous excitement; there is a sense of looking forward to something.

An older word you ask? Not at all. Tizzy came into use in the 1930s. You can just imagine the first stars of the silver screen causing people to feel in a tizzy every time a new movie came out.

Speaking of movies, leaving the house was always a production when I was little. We lived several miles outside of town, in the country as we used to say. Going to the mall or downtown required getting things ready … shutting up the house … getting into the car (a big event for us) … and pulling away for our adventure. So mom had lots of expressions to refer to leaving.

One of them I thought was our own … in fact is shared … and it goes like this: Leaving like a terd of hurdles. That dear mixed-up phrase is more common than you’d think.

The real expression goes like this … to leave like a herd of turtles … the image is clear … And they’re off! but apparently the play on words is lots of families’ private joke.

Today, no appointments, thank goodness, but lots of deadlines, so I won’t have to leave the house at an appointed time. I can sit here in my own kind of swivet trying to finish my articles before they’re due.

Yesterday driving home with unexpected relief after a stressful appointment in Chapel Hill (nice people, stressful circumstances), Greg and I had time to let off steam and laugh about things.

At one point he goes, Here’s something that really gets my gourd.

You see Greg has a talent for confounding figures of speech, twisting and mixing them into almost expressions that are still recognizable, but somehow not right. And you can’t figure out why. I’ve heard it called malaphorism, but not sure that’s a real word.

Since we were driving, I did not have a dictionary on me and was forced to sit there and whine, Honey, are you sure that’s right? That doesn’t sound right to me. But I couldn’t think of what it was supposed to be.

Now, armed with my trusty Oxford English Dictionary, I can at last settle the matter.

My husband, I’m afraid, was a little out of his gourd, what with the long drive and stressful situation yesterday when he was trying to express himself.

Out of your gourd means to be out of your mind, or crazy. It also refers to being under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

What he meant to say, I believe, was Do you want to know what gets my goat?

I have no idea why we refer to this beleaguered ruminant to express irritation, but that’s the common usage. To get your goat means it gets on your last nerve.

If something gets your last goat, you could say it really galls you. Gall means impudent behavior … coming from the bile-filled organ we affectionately call the gallbladder.

Used as a verb, it is transitive, and means to irritate or even give rise to a sore on the skin, such as when a bridle abrades a horse’s coat.

Of course it it were me chomping at the bit, it would probably get my goat. But that’s a horse of a different color.