I’m Beginning to Regret Teaching You That Word, Granny
Girl: I saw that movie when it came out, The Passion of the Christ.
Grandma: What movie?
Girl: The Passion of the Christ. You haven’t heard of it?
Grandma: Yes, but I’m not interested in watching it. Mel Gibson produced it.
Girl: Oh. So it’s a principle thing.
Grandma: No. It’s an I-don’t-like douchebaginess thing.
–JFK Airport
via Overheard in New York, May 22, 2008
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I want her to be my grandma!)
И мне нравитÑÑ…
There were plenty of pre-hippy bubbies that let it all hang out… it’s just that Yiddish lets you say these things with a bit more color, style, and nuance.
My mother was a super cool semi-hippie chick who started toning it down when I was in my teens and is becoming ever more bubbie’ish since the grandchildren have arrived.
My grandmother, on the other hand, had a nasty mouth that would embarrass my father, till the day she died.
They were that generation, but if you look into history critically, you’ll see that the actual number of hippies was way lower than some like to paint it to have been nowadays. Since it’s been forty years since the “Summer of Love”, there’s been quite some coverage, at least over here, and the general tenor on Jewish media was that in 1968, any Jew with more than a pea as a brain was more concerned with and about other political matters than your everyday hippie was. On non-Jewish media, you’ve got leftwing terrorist extremists from the RAF celebrating themselves as well as the one or the other formerly prominent, now disillusioned hippie, particularly concubines of hippies of former fame that have come to the conclusion that the hippie movement degraded women to sexual objects as sex became independent of love and procreation / family. There’s a pretty controversial book out these days that claims that hippies were fascistoid in the sense that they were not integrative and tolerant of those that wanted to live the lifestyle they considered the norma normans.
Many grandma’s today were hippies in the 60’s. It’s time to get over the nostalgia of the little old bubbe from the shtetl.
Just to clarify, it’s a quotation from “Overheard”. Still, that grandma’s terrific.
That’s AWESOME.
Both the word “douchebagginess” and your grandma. My grandma wouldn’t say that, but she does say “jackassery”.
I want her to be my grandma!