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Wondering about words while wandering

My father, Dr. Don Roberts, who practiced medicine in Elkins after World War II, took a great interest in what his patients would say about their daily lives, and he tried to understand words they used that were not in the vocabulary of his New-England-born parents.  He was always writing quotations, and some of his notes are still in our attic in a stacks of boxes I’m supposed to remove.

On a Davis Memorial Hospital patient progress pad from the 1970s Daddy scrawled, “People can be ornery./ People will do most anything to get their own way. / Stress brings out the best and the worst in people.” I liked this observation and put it on my kitchen bulletin board thinking that ornery meant obstinate, stubborn or even mean.

Then last week one of my neighbors was talking about a little boy in her care, and she said.  “He’s just ornery; he’s not mean.” When I asked what ornery meant if it was not mean, she said the kid was just a little tricky, but he did not really want to do harm. An ornery child was inclined toward a playful sort of tricky behavior, but in an older person orneriness might translate to crankiness or harmless petulance.

Ornery is not a word I often see in print, but this week while practicing my dulcimer, I spotted on’ry in one of my favorite Appalachian Christmas carols. The last stanza of the song goes:

“I wonder as I wander out under the sky

How Jesus the Savior did come for to die

For poor on’ry people like you and like I;

I wonder as I wander out under the sky.”

According to Wikipedia, the song was transcribed by John Jacob Niles July 16,1933 in Murphy, North Carolina, when a beautiful but painfully poor girl named Annie Morgan sang it at an evangelical meeting. Ornery may mean sinful in this context; however, the adjective ornery was first used in 19th century America when people pronounced ordinary with an accent (vocabulary.com).  In this haunting carol the word ornery or on’ry may mean ordinary.

I wonder how people changed the concept of ordinariness to the idea of obstinacy or crankiness?

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