It sure is lucky that a few of us still remember the language we learned as children. I have a notion that left to their own devices, teenagers alone could get rid of the most colorful parts of speech in one generation. They'd switch us to such short cuts as "cool" to save the trouble of picking out one of the thousand or so adjectives their grandparents doted on. In the Ozarks especially, old people took pride in describing something so exactly that there was no way a listener could misunderstand--like my old neighbor describing how fast a young, wild turkey could gain altitude: "Why them jakes could fly out of a 40-foot silo!" he said. His generation believed in word pictures. My wife's Aunt Maude was evidence that women were even better at this kind of description, telling of a family so poor, "They didn't have nails to scratch their heads." And of one winter, "It was so cold the clock froze."

Aunt Maude would have had no patience with "cool" as a description of anything, and even the added emphasis of "way cool" wouldn't have pleased her one bit more.

It was a measure of those times, when no one had much money, that Ozarks people valued free things like descriptive words and spent them on everything. I once heard a man squander five adverbs to tell where the water turbine used to be located in Alley Spring: "Why it was down around in under behind there som'ers, I believe."

And I one time got to hear a local auctioneer described in a regular waterfall of adjectives: "Why, that hairy legged, pitiful old buzzard is the beatin'est, orneriest, lyinest, sorry use for a spoilt hide I ever struck in all my put togethers."

I would hope that any teenager today, getting by on such poor fare as "Like, I go, Wow! Cool!" would get a chance to hear the way their ancestors talked, and listen to the way they described things to each other. When I got the chance to peer into the archives of Shannon County's oldest newspaper, The Current Wave, I came up with some dandy examples of the way we used to say things.

"A new broom sweeps good," said a lady named Sarah Jones, in her nineties. "But the old one knows how to get to where the dirt stays." A fine saying about brooms all right, but in her case talking about the new mayor.

I wish I had met Sarah Jones, but she died in 1974. I wish I could have been there to hear that tiny lady tell a huge man: "Get out of here, you big ugly thing, before I knock you down and slap you fer fallin'."

I'm not saying everybody should talk like Sarah Jones or even like Aunt Maude (who once gave me her theory of living: "I'd rather burn out like a cedar as to be wore out like a door step."), but I still hope we can hang onto a little of their color. I don't think any of us need to hear our grandchildren describe the Grand Canyon as "way cool!"