My cousin says that, to get a lot of attention, nothing beats a good, solid business bust. And he should know.

A few years back, he was infected with a fad that was sweeping our countryside. He invested heavily in rhea (or is it rheas?), those tall, gawky birds that are sort of the South American version of emus, only smaller. But I'll let him tell you about it:

"First, though, I had to build 8-feet-high cyclone fences to keep the rheas in and predators out," he recalled. "I fenced in plots of about 5 or 6 acres and built nesting sheds. Then, I went out and bought several breeding pairs.

"That is, I bought male and female pairs; breeding turned out to be another matter. It seems rheas have kinda strange ideas about sex. The females pick their mates. If they don't like a male rhea, they won't have anything to do with him. Most of the females I bought didn't seem to like any of the males.

"About this time, the rhea market began to go soft," my cousin added. "In fact, it went downright squishy right after I bought into it. As far as I could find out, the last guy to make any money on rheas was the man who sold me those so-called breeding pairs.

"At the same time, interest rates went through the roof. I had a lot of debt and no cash-flow to service it with. I could hear the heavy, creaking sound of overhead building up, and I couldn't do a thing about it. My financial floor began to sag badly.

"When it became obvious that I was losing my business battle, the lenders went to court and froze my assets," he said. "I was worse than broke. The value of my assets didn't cover the amount of my loans. That's when the lenders sent in their auditors to bayonet the wounded.

"It became apparent that my lenders weren't going to get all their money back, let alone the interest due, so they wrote off a big chunk of what I owed them. That created another economic pickle. The Internal Revenue Service considered those forgiven debts as income, and wanted income taxes on them.

"Here I was, with a negative net worth and a big tax bill hanging over my head," he sighed. "I had no alternative but to take Chapter 7 bankruptcy. I took a job driving a truck.

"But I guess it was an educational experience," my cousin said. "Since then, whenever I read about somebody making a lot of money raising Boer goats or jalape–o peppers, I just tear that page out of the paper and throw it away."

And I wouldn't want to be around should someone suggest to my cousin that he ought to look into any kind of long-necked bird as a farm enterprise.

For those of you who listen to words, Missouri is the happy hunting ground of language collecting. Most of us who live here don't even know we're collecting; we just hear a word or an expression like, "I'd say he gives misers a bad name, except he never give nobody nothing."

It's not always the words themselves that are funny-though some of them, like "sy-gogglin" for out of plumb, "wonky-jawed" for off level, and "huntin' possums" for an errant headlight are pretty funny to us. But it's the way people put things together that make us remember who said what, and pass it on. Missourians don't like to waste a perfectly good saying or description if somebody said it just right. We end up saying it ourselves.

Take some of these quotes from Missouri people, as good today as they were 50 years ago.

"The trouble with hunting wild turkeys is having to get up an hour before you go to bed."

"I like other folks' children fine, long as they don't act like I took 'em to raise."

"I got snake-bit bad and for 3 days I just hung over the drop edge of yonder before I could get a hold."

"If a kid don't want to stay on the farm it ain't in nature to hold 'em. You can't keep a squirrel on the ground."

"Well, I tried my best to inspire my first husband to amount to something, but you can't polish manure."

"I knew there was a cyclone comin', for the world turned black as the inside of a angus cow."

"When Dad saw what the interest rate on that loan would be, he had a fit and fell back in it."

"I reckon that folks waits for the right person to come along, but I notice it don't keep them from getting married meanwhile."

"Now if your wife can't kill a turkey with this shotgun, she's the one needs to go back to the factory."

"She had on so much lipstick she looked like a bluejay in mulberry time."

Now, if I were a college professor, I'd tell my students that these are examples of figurative description. Since I'm not, I'll settle for telling you that in Missouri, people still fling descriptive words like mud intended to stick.

As an old Ozark preacher once instructed a young one:

"Now if you're of a mind to mention Hell at all, don't preach hot, preach great balls of fire!"