Wednesday, May 7, 2025

He don't say.

From A treasury of American anecdotes; sly, salty, shaggy stories of heroes and hellions, beguilers and buffoons, spellbinders and scapegoats, gagsters and gossips, from the grassroots and sidewalks of America by Benjamin Albert Botkin.  

A Vermonter seldom hurries and he never wastes a motion. Vermont humor is like that—it ambles along, takes its time, and never wastes a word.

Vermonters have little patience with even an accepted area of word wasting. Some years back a politician was addressing a small audience in a meeting house. He had been speaking for fifteen minutes when an elderly man in the front row took his cupped hand away from his ear and turned to the people behind him. 

What s he talking about?” he asked in the piercing tones of the partially deaf.

The group behind him considered the question for some time.   Finally a spokesman leaned forward and said, “He don't say.”

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