Published in 2011, the late John Eddie Vogt’s book, Witches, Bitches, and Other Small Town Folks, brings to life the quirky, unforgettable, and entertaining tales of growing up and living in Kendall County from the 1930s through the 1960s. Thanks to the gracious permission of his family, The Kendall Gentleman is honored to share excerpts from his book for your enjoyment.
The following are some writings that I have found interesting over the years.
Refuting Forest Gump’s Wisdom
Life isn’t like a box of chocolates.
It’s more like a jar of jalapenos.
What you do today
might burn your ass tomorrow.
Big Words
In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compacted comprehensibleness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement, and assinine affectations.
Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and veracious vivacity, without rhodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity, and vaniloquent vapidity. Shun double-entendres, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscurean or apparent.
In other words: Talk plainly, briefly, naturally, sensibly, truthfully, purely. Keep from slang; don’t put on airs; say what you mean; mean what you say. And don’t use big words.
More from John Eddie Vogt: For another helping of the same wry observation, read Customs & Manners, his lesson on what it cost to walk past your mother’s friends without saying hello. Or visit Thrifty German for the old-country attitudes JEV grew up watching.