This morning I asked Max to feed the cat. For emphasis I added, "fast, like Jack the Bear." Which made me wonder (again) where it came from and what it means.
I know I got it from my dad. He used it often in sentences like this: 'I told old so-and-so I'd stop by and look at that truck, but I'll be fast like Jack the Bear.' Ironically, this usually meant we were about to spend a lot of time waiting in the car while he picked up a part, dropped something off, or helped someone out.
Until I left home, I never thought to ask what it meant. The meaning was clear enough and I thought it was just another one of his colloquialisms, like The Dairy Kink (Dairy Queen), pass the moke, Joke (please pass the milk), back when I was a little girl (a long time ago) or, this is better than hammered horse-pucky (this tastes really good).
It wasn't until I started using it with my kids, who would stare at me and ask "Who's Jack the Bear?" that I realized I didn't know. And then, this morning, I finally thought to google it. I wasn't really expecting to find anything, but it turns out that Jack the Bear is a racing term, meaning the car is moving at optimum efficiency or running flat-out.
Huh. Maybe I'll google hammered horse-pucky...
4 comments:
For those of you who knew my dad, I need help remembering some of the other things he said...I don't want to forget them, and I couldn't recall very many this morning. :(
I never knew the back ground of that expression either. I'll have to think if I can remember any other expressions of Dad's. I do use some distinctive vocabular I inherited from Dad though. Like jockey-box instead of glove-box. Or crummy as a name for a suburban like vehicle. I learned in recent years that crummy was a term used by loggers.
Oh yes! Jockey-box. That term has caused so much mocking of me in my life. I finally taught myself to say glove compartment, but I still say jockey-box when my guard is down.
Another phrase Dad used to say: "There's nothin' quite like Mom's Apple Pandowdy. It makes your tongue stick out and your stomach say howdy." And, "Apple pie without the cheese is like a hug without the squeeze."
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