Snobbery in the Verb

Sometime during the hippie period, say the early 1970s, I  was driving the big green Dodge station wagon solo from who knows where to somewhere else, and as was my custom in those turbulent days, I picked up a hitchhiker -- a mighty scrawny young guy. He seemed to be in bad shape -- underfed and dirty. I suspected "speed." Compassionately, I offered him a piece of my sandwich. He turned me down, saying, "I don't use white bread." 

What an effective sentence! In a mere five words,  he managed to claim complete moral superiority over me. I was now dismissed as a "user" of white bread. and therefore clearly an unenlightened conformist bourgeois -- probably a rabid supporter of the carpet bombing of Cambodia. He, on the other hand, was a butterfly, free and liberated and a dissenter from the Loathed Establishment.

But I don't think I would remember this incident if it weren't for his deployment of the word "use." "Use" asserts an equivalence between two habits -- between whatever cocktail of drugs that he might be injecting or snorting or dropping, and the white bread that I was consuming. It was also implied that my addiction was the worser one. My emaciated pal was, in his own mind, doing me a favor, enlightening me about the depravity of my bread habit. 

But let me say a word in defense of the bread -- I don't "use" white bread in the sense of Silvercup or Wonder Bread -- at least not since I left Flatbush neighborhood of origin. The slices of bread in question might not have been made of steelcut handmilled wheat berries enhanced with millet and quinoa and baked in a hickory-fired furnace, but it would have been a perfectly respectable bread and one that should not have been denigrated by a skinny tie-dyed trust fund baby soon to shave his scraggly beard and rejoin his father's insurance business.

But I sure do admire his use of the verb "use."

Here's a more recent incident. On the semi-famous Boulder Mall, not long ago, a panhandler carrying a sign that said, "Anything Helps" held out his hand.  Compassionately, I gave him a quarter.  He returned it to me, announcing, "I don't take coins."

Well, everybody has to have standards. 

Once again, I've been put in my place by a verb. "I don't take coins."  

A third instance: I was in Boston and I wandered into a ragged antique store that sold old and truly ancient Chinese art. The place is a mess but I notice that the goods are museum-quality -- sculptures, mostly, but paintings and even a few bronze pieces -- Neolithic for all I know.  Way out of the range of my wallet or checkbook. Trying to appear knowledgeable, I ask the proprietor if he has any Green Fitzhugh. Peering over lunettes, he says, with aggrieved condescension, "I don't do export."  

Floored again. Put in my place by Mr. Hippie, Mr. Panhandler, and Mr. Antique Dealer -- all of them master practitioners who know how to make a simple monosyllabic verb do a heck of a lot of snobbish work. 

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

Each one used a monosyllabic transitive verb in a sentence with a subject, verb, and object. Concise. Active voice. Specific. Such sentences can wither anybody.

If the bread guy had said, "I'm not into white bread," if the beggar had said, "Coins are not taken here," and if the proprietor had said, "Export is not where it's at," you might have had a chance.