Recent items here were about an Appalachian regional usage in which "I don't care to" "or "I don't care" means the opposite of what it seems. In that usage it means "I would like to" or "I don't mind."
In one of the items, I mentioned that a boyhood friend, when asked if he wanted to have supper with us, responded, "I don't care," when it was obvious that he wanted to, or was at least willing. Jacky Dodd of Mount Airy has responded:
"Your recent column … prompted me to send this note to you. Keep in mind that I am now only five months shy of age 79, so you have to hark back a bit in time to fully appreciate this.
"We were a family of five (three kids) and growing up back in the days of not having very much in the way of worldly goods. My aunt married a man of some means, and when we would visit them, my aunt always had a candy dish on the coffee table, and it always held delicious chocolates.
"She would pass this plate and say, ‘Would you like a chocolate?' My younger brother would simply just grab one, and my older sister always reached in very daintily and picked one.
"I, on the other hand, said, ‘I don't care,' meaning of course, ‘Yes I would love one,' but I never wanted to appear too greedy.
"So after about the third or fourth visit with the same conversation … my aunt, after hearing my ‘I don't care,' said, ‘Well, honey, if you don't care, neither do I,' and she placed the dish back on the coffee table.
"As I recall, as my sister and brother were eating their candy, my eyes were filling with tears. Keep in mind we never had such treats in those days as a candy dish sitting out anywhere, and I am just dying to have a piece of candy.
"So I said, ‘What did you say about the candy?' She repeated herself (‘Would you like a chocolate?') and I am sure you can guess what I said that time.
"Let me tell you, I never said ‘I don't care' again when asked if I wanted something -- a lesson hard learned, but over the years we had many laughs about how I learned very quickly to say, ‘Yes please.'
A Winston-Salem reader has found fault, on two counts, with a headline that appeared in the Journal last Tuesday. It appeared over a story about President Bush's lifting a ban on oil drilling off the coast of North Carolina and other states.
The headline said, "Coast off of N.C. may be focus." The first quarrel is with the notion that the coast is off North Carolina. That would put it in the sea. A coast is not the sea bordering the land, but just the opposite, the land bordering the sea.
The second quarrel is with "off of." The Associated Press Stylebook, which the Journal generally follows, says that of is unnecessary. Some commentators say that it is redundant and should be avoided after off.
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English says that using of after off should be restricted to what it calls casual and impromptu levels.
My advice: Avoid "off of" in all cases and no one will find fault with your usage.
From Henry Church of Winston-Salem: "Reading an old issue of Oxford American the other day I came across this: ‘He drizzled sauce over the chopped pork with a mustard-sauce-sobbed rag fixed to a chinaberry limb.'
"I have seen sop used to denote something saturated with liquid (The dog was sopping wet), but never sob. Is this an error, or perhaps an archaic usage not covered by my dictionary?"
Failing to find sob as a synonym for sop in any of my dictionaries, I turned to the Internet. There I found a free online edition of the 1913 Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary. One of its definitions of the verb sob is to soak
Even that far back the usage was labeled obsolete. Church's reference to it was the first time I had come across it.
■ Richard Creed is a retired Journal editor. He can be reached at richcreed@triad.rr.com.
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