Our earlier conversation about the word ruminate prompts a Fort Worth, Texas, listener to send a poem that his aunt, an elementary-school teacher, made him memorize as a child: This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Gum-Chewing Doggerel”
You remember our conversation about the word ruminate?
Mm—
Stomachs.
Stomachs of cows, right?
Right.
And how cows chew their cud.
A cud comes back up.
Yeah.
But ruminate can also mean to be thoughtful, to be turning something over in one’s mind.
That prompted Mark Primock from Fort Worth to write us with a poem that his Aunt Frances Fagey Greenberger made him memorize when he was a kid.
It goes, a gum-chewing boy and a cud-chewing cow.
To me, they seem alike somehow.
But there’s a difference.
I see it now.
It’s the thoughtful look on the face of the cow.
That’s pretty good, yeah.
Yeah, she taught elementary school students, and she made all of them memorize that poem.
And I looked it up, and apparently there are different versions of this poem that were really popular at one point.
In fact, it appeared in an Ann Landers column.
You remember the old advice column?
A couple of times, people really, I think a lot of adults really dug that poem as a way to get kids not to chew gum.
That points out kind of the discrepancy.
We think of ruminate as usually a good thing, right?
Also from the cow chewing its cud and looking thoughtfully off into the horizon.
And yet you don’t look thoughtful when you’re smacking gum.
No, you don’t.
A cow looks smarter.
A cow looks smarter than you when you’re chewing gum.
