| significantly to the growing list. When I got to college, however, I quickly learned that such Texanisms, as I was calling my collection of sayings, were generally not appropriate to the real and faux intellectual discussions that flowed inside and outside of college classes. Thus, weeks, even months, passed by without any noticeable additions to the list. |
| While a college student, I was spending more time with intellectuals than with the salt-of-the-earth types I had grown up with. In the process, I discovered that, by and large, intellectual conversation was not nearly as colorful, descriptive, fun, or even particularly informational, as that of country folk. |
| During those years I was inflicting myself with higher education, I began spending a large percentage of the day exploring around the collections in libraries. Here, among the books and journals, I discovered uncountable adventures, masterpieces of writing, accounts of explorations, biographies, and cultural treatises, and likely learned more useful information than in most classes I took. I also learned, as a result of encountering several books on folklore and folkways, that the Texanisms I was collecting were called "folk sayings" by the scholars who studied them. Folk sayings, they wrote, were handed down via the oral tradition, and are expressions that are considered quite acceptable, even useful, to the folk who use them. In fact, according to the books, scholars sometimes traveled throughout the country collecting such folk sayings. The books provided examples of folk sayings from different geographic |
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