Who, Where, When,
What and How Comeby
Mary A. Green
Daughter Linda said she had really enjoyed having her two-year-old granddaughter, Mary Jane, over for a week's visit. And then added, "Except that she was always asking me 'How come?' All day it was 'How come mosquitoes bite?" or 'How come cherries have pits?' or "How come cats have whiskers?"
"All kids are the same," I reminded her and then told her of when she was a toddler and wanted to know why mosquitoes bite and why cats have whiskers... And then it hit me that the questions my children had asked me were different from those posed by my great-granddaughter. When Linda wanted to know the reason for something, she used to ask "Why?" Mary Jane says, "How come?"
How this change came about I can only speculate, but I do recall an incident in the 1970's when another daughter had shown me an essay she'd written in a high school English class and was very pleased with its B+ grading. "Good work!" I commented after reading it. Then I took time to point out she might have earned an "A" if she'd been more careful with a few small things, and had used the more appropriate "Why?" rather than the slang "How come?" in several instances.
She retorted that her teacher hadn't said anything about it so it must have been okay. And what did I, a mere mother, know about it anyway?
It was from my Uncle Ed that I first heard "How come?" used instead of "Why?" I was eight back in the late 1930's when he came courting my Aunt Minnie. His mode of transportation in those days was a roofless, doorless yellow racing car which he proudly referred to as "my jalopy", a vehicle rescued from the junk yard and rebuilt with his own hands and a couple of good wrenches.
Today we'd accept Uncle Ed as a non-conformist or a rebel. But my grandparents, to whom remnants of Victorian propriety clung tightly as burrs to woollen britches, thought him vulgar and an altogether unfit suitor for Aunt Minnie's hand.
But I was fascinated by his off-beat demeanor and colourful language. The way he called a glass of milk, "cow juice", and how, when he took that can of snuff out of his shirt pocket he'd say, "Need 'nother pinch o' snooze". And the way he always wore running shoes and called them sneakers.
I was visiting at my grandparents' farm one summer weekend and showing off my red T-strap sandal-style running shoes recently acquired through the mail-order catalogue. Ed noticed them right away.
"Where'd you get them fancy sneakers, kid?" he asked.
"They're not sneakers. They're T-strap sandals," I snapped.
"Sneakers!"
"T-strap sandals! Says so right in the catalogue."
Aunt Minnie, now dressed up and ready to go out, rescued us from one another. As they walked toward his jalopy I heard Uncle Ed remark, "How come that kid always has so much to say?"
Then, that fall during harvest, Grandfather's big grain-hauling truck broke down and Uncle Ed managed to do a fast emergency repair job on it. After this my grandparents' feelings toward him softened and Aunt Minnie was allowed to marry him. Ed and Minnie raised four bright children who nonetheless referred to their running shoes as "sneakers" and asked "How come?" instead of "Why?"
Meanwhile I got on with my education at a one-room country school where my teachers¾heroes and heroines of my childhood¾prepared us for the Grade 8 departmental exams. They taught us that Britannia ruled the waves, that Prime Minister Mackenzie King was a wise man, and that the abbreviation for Manitoba was always spelled M-A-N period. If I were late for class, or if I didn't finish my homework, the teachers didn't care how this came about; they wanted to know "Why?"
But even as my contemporaries and I were being processed with curricula for our times, the Uncle Ed's of our times with the aid of new inventions, had begun to influence my society's way of speaking and thinking at future-shock speed. When radio and TV came knocking at our doors to court our minds, we gave them and other technological marvels positions of prominence in our homes and in our lives. And the very vulnerable among us, our young people, have, for several decades now, been influenced by their rock-star heroes, those rebels for the sake of a buck.
Even in mainstream broadcasting I hear grammatical errors, that would have earned me detention and 100 lines on the blackboard, now accepted as part of our everyday language. For example, while watching a baseball game on TV, I heard an announcer comment, "Molitor's hitting pretty good today. I wonder how come that is?"
Should I raise my blood pressure even further, fretting that so much of what I was taught at school has become obsolete? Should I try to teach Mary Jane to say "Why?" instead of "How come?" No. I will become a non-conformist, a grey-haired rebel who asks "Why?" when knowing it's the reason that really matters. When I write to my dear Aunt Minnie, now living alone since uncle Ed's passing, I'll continue to address her letters to Saskatoon, S-A-S-K period, with M-A-N period, in the return address. And anyway, nobody wears sneakers any more. We're into joggers. So there, Uncle Ed, wherever you are!
(Pseudonyms used in all cases except for Paul Molitor's name.)