“What’s another word for Thesaurus.”
Steve Wright
Dateline: Kriet-Land
The beauty of human language is that, unless you are an English teacher, you can play with it.
“Ain’t” ain’t supposedly a word except many of us use it all the time, which in fact when we say ain’t it ain’t nothing at all but is in fact a word which it ain’t supposed to be. When I say, “It ain’t here,” it’s not like I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
English, is a moving target, them folks in the 18th century American talked like 18th century Americans and they were perfectly correct back then but if one of those dudes suddenly ended up here in our century and asked me, “Sir did you cast up one’s accounts,” I would deny everything thinking he was some IRS auditor or something but in fact in his language of the day he would be asking me if I just threw up.
Yep.
“Baked,” back then meant, exhausted, today, means a whole other thing.
Yep.
Now, if you have ever raised children during those first speakin’ ages of two to maybe four, you know, YOU KNOW that in the privacy of your own home you are still using some of those childhood malaprops.
Every chipmunk I ever see is in fact a “chick-a-munk.” Admit it you do it too.
Be it military or traffic spotter a helicopter is always in my mind a “hop-a-copter.”
To me the greatest part of speech is how we play with it, if me and you are having a beer or three at a bar somewhere and you start mocking my Hawaiian shirts and I tell you, “Don’t go there,” I don’t mean don’t go somewhere you want to go I mean, “Shut Up.”
Stuff we say doesn’t always mean what the stuff we say.
And no one out here is better at saying stuff that doesn’t actually mean exactly what he is saying then Jeff Kriet.
I call it, simply, Kriet-Speak.
And it works like this….um…hum…ya know…huh…HERE JUST LISTEN:
Frankly, I’m not sure I can translate any of that, but Jared Lintner, the guy shaking his head while listening is Kriet’s roommate on the Elite trail and he has heard it all.
More importantly, has learned it all…Lintner will translate for you, this is what a “linecutter” is:
Kriet was born in Chicago, moved to Oklahoma “around two,” was the state champ in tennis during his sophomore year in high school, graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in Economics was a banker for a decade or so.
To be honest I was shocked when I wrote that note down about being a banker, for all the years I’ve been out here and listening to him I thought he was some sort of bee keeper.
Thought he was a health nut with honey and fruit juice or something, turns out, well, just listen.
Okay, was I like wrong with a bee keeper.
I told Barb though, he must be good because I never saw any bee stings on his arms, but that maybe, just maybe he was like a psychic or something, maybe a palm reader, “Barb I don’t know what he does but I think he carries a crystal ball around or something.”
Sort of explains all the weird looks Jeff gave me when I asked him all these years if the Buffalo Bills would be in the Super Bowl again.
In Kriet-speak a “magnum” is not a 1.5 liter bottle of Champagne, which in fact I now have to bring back to the liquor store, nor is a “Macdaddy” anything you can order at Big D’s.
And a “masher,” has nothing to do with squished potatoes.
I have to take this moment to publically apologize to Jeff and his entire family for telling Barb all these years that I think he may have a “problem with Champagne,” not to mention all those McDonald’s gift cards I….
“Why fit in when you were born to stand out.”
Dr. Seuss
Jeff Kriet to me embodies the flavor of this game out here and make no mistake, it is the flavor of the game, any game, that makes us, that keeps us as fans.
It is the language of the game that makes me smile.
The first time someone on stage said, “I caught a toad today,” I googled whether catching amphibians was legal in that state.
I once asked, “How do we do catch and release if you catch the fish on terminal tackle doesn’t it like kill them.”
And in fact when you hear us say we “whacked” them today we never actually hit or spanked anything this or any day.
Language, or how we mold it, is the flavor of life, it is art, spoken.
Many thanks to my friend Jared for going along with this, special thanks also to Chris the internet guru at Bassmaster who figured out how to put this together [Editor’s Note: I am not a guru of anything.], but most of all, thank you to Jeff Kriet.
Jeff, my friend, thank you for making this sport come alive, thank you for the excitement you put in when you describe it, thank you for your art of the spoken word.
May you always have your, “Arse Upward*.”
db
*18th century for “be in good luck.”
“I never said most of the things I said.”
Yogi Berra