Phraseology 102

1. I was very upset this summer, while reading an excellent piece by Alex Kotlowitz in the NYT Magazine, to see a glaring error that had passed through their proofreaders’ fingers. In an article about the gee-not-racist-and-xenophobic-at-all efforts of the people of Carpentersville, IL, to make themselves an English-only city, Kotlowitz interviewed a woman heading up the efforts to pass such a resolution, even though, basically, some of her best friends are (or used to be) Mexican. Describing the difficulties of her quest, at one point she mentions she didn’t want to get her “things caught in the ringer.”

What “ringer”? An alarm clock? A doorbell? Quasimodo? Is it a reference to horseshoes?

Of course not. She meant to say, “tits caught in the wringer,” a phrase made most famous by WashPost publisher Katherine Graham. (For all you Gen Xers, we’re talking about a hand-cranked clothes wringer that would pinch laundry dry on wash day.) But by getting all Midwest prissy and trying to craft a PG version of this vulgarism, she confused the copy editors (and possibly Kotlowitz) and gutted any meaning from it. Hell, woman, if you spend your time rousing up your neighbors because your Mexican neighbors aren’t “American” enough, saying “tits” in a national magazine is the least of your worries.

2. On Monday, I was having lunch in Heaven on Seven on Ontario Street for the first time in a long time. Mmmm-mmmm, so good. On the way out I used the washroom, which was tucked in a very quiet corner of the restaurant. The room was silent when I entered it, but the ambient music soon kicked in and gave me a start. A snare drum started popping away, and a chorus of voices started chanting, “Feets, don’t fail me now, feets don’t fail me now….”

And I began to realize how much I love that phrase. “Feets, don’t fail me now.” Just the concept of taking time during a moment of imminent danger to talk to your feet and counsel them, abjure them, BEG them to do their duty and rescue the body they’re attached to. Apparently in the past, the feets had in fact “failed” this person? The instinctive fight-or-flight reaction is short-circuited just long enough for the speaker to address his appendages and confer on a plan for survival. Do the feet argue the point, or do they do their duty quickly enough? Does the man thank them later and apologize for his lack of faith? Do the feet resent the pressure being put on them?

When was this phrase first used? I have no idea–probably in some old movie full of Stepin-Fetchit stereotypes. How nice for a Cajun band to use it as a refrain in the song and reclaim it from its racist origins. I look forward to the day when I can use such a loaded, inherently-contradictory phrase without worrying about getting a punch in the mouth.

2 Replies to “Phraseology 102”

  1. Todd Rundgren and Utopia did “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now” in 1980 or 81, as I recall, leaving blackface out of it entirely.

  2. And of course, Little Feat had an album entitled “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now”, which is out of the debate entirely.

    I went online to find the version I heard int he restroom, but I could only find Utopia and Rockin’ Dopsie. The version I heard had a lot of percussion up front, no instrumentation.

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