When my lil brother was growing up, the family lived in a semi-rural area north of Santa Fe (the Pojoaque valley, about 15 miles north of town), a locale in which everybody rode the school bus (until they could afford/promote/steal a car).
Bus routes and routines being what they are, it was customary for the bus to drop Pete--then perhaps 7 or 8 years old--off at a certain time every day. One day he was quite late getting home.
Mother, of course, asked him why he was so late. Whereupon Pete regaled her with the exciting details of the north-bound Greyhound with an axle-fire that burnt up the back of the bus and closed the road between school and home ahead of the school bus, and the attendant excitement as the volunteer fire department descended (a member of which was our Dad), with the state cops, and the frustrated truckers snarling in line behind. In summary, he told her, out on the highway it was "total chouse."
Which stopped Momma in her tracks for a second. "Chouse?"
So he spelled it.
I mean, really, when you're a (precocious) kid from north of Santa Fe, HOW ELSE would you pronounce "C H A O S"?
1 comment:
That's the best phonics could ever do.
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