"So How Is Everybody on Walton's Mountain?"

Until I came to Taiwan, I never really gave much thought to how much I relied not just on the English language, but on American culture. Americans, I suspect, often slip into thinking of their Americanness as a kind of void. We put all manner of adjectives in front of "American"--Chinese-American, African-American, Jewish-American--not just to express some kind of ethnic pride or identity, but to make the American part of ourselves less prominent, to erase a bit of its nothingness.

Indeed, I recall taking a class in college with a sociology professor who insisted that there was no such thing as American culture--that American society no longer had any coherent set of signs, symbols, and values that constituted a coherent culture. Though I understand where she came from in asserting this, I think that maybe a little time living abroad might change her mind.

I notice this most when I occasionally when I contemplate the English language, and realize how many expressions and terms there are that draw on a shared American historical or cultural experience. For instance, every so often, my mother goes to visit her mother, who lives in a small town in southwestern Missouri. Although she would dispute me on this, I tend to think of this town as being pretty much the middle of nowhere, the kind of place certain kinds of people on both coasts think of when they use the term "flyover country." To get a rise out of her, I sometimes ask about these visits home by saying, "So how is everybody on Walton's Mountain?"

Now, I've heard that expression used by people in America who have never, ever personally seen The Waltons. I think its meaning can vary depending on context. Either it can be a slightly humorous way of asking, "So how's the family?" Or it can be a half put-down, implying that the place someone has just visited is, well, really the sticks.

I thought about this at work today, mostly in the context of how I would explain this expression to a non-native speaker of English. How on earth do you convey the kinds of associations The Waltons has, both to its devoted fans and its most vehement detractors? How do you explain what the first president Bush meant when he said he wanted an America "more like The Waltons and less like The Simpsons?" I know every country, even one as urbanized as Taiwan, has its conception of a rural life. But how do you convey the kind of down-home folksiness combined with nostalgia that a reference to The Waltons implies in America?

Yesterday, I had to explain a similarly mystifying expression during a conversation with Casey, a Taiwanese woman who works in the head office of Shane. Casey had come to do a sort of last-minute inspection before the school opens. She asked me if I thought everything was in order, and I believe I told her the school was ready to open. I responded by telling her the school was "shipshape and Bristol fashion." Naturally, this required some explanation. I told her that "Bristol fashion" came from the shipbuilding industry in England; if a ship was "Bristol fashion", that meant it was just like new.

Later on, I looked up the phrase on the internet. This is actually not what "Bristol fashion means." Apparently, in the port at Bristol, it was very hard for a ship to navigate if it was weighted down by too much rubbish. So to go through Bristol harbor, a ship apparently had to scuttle its trash and clean up.

How many phrases are there like this that we English speakers use without really stopping to think what they mean? Or whose meaning is steeped in a culture and history we may or may not be cognizant of? How many people who use the term malapropism actually know of its connection with a fictional character called Mrs. Malaprop? When we talk about Jim Crow laws, do any of us really remember a nineteenth-century minstrel character named Jim Crow, who was apparently so popular that his name become one for African Americans generally?

Now, to be honest, I probably will not much opportunity to teach this kind of language in my classes, all of which are either for elementary-age students or for adults who are at what my school calls "foundation level"--meaning, they know the alphabet and not much else. I don't imagine Walton's Mountain will figure heavily in our discussions for a long time.

But I have been surrounded all my life by phrases like, "so how is everybody on Walton's Mountain," without really realizing it. Now that I have to explain phrase like that, I am coming to realize just how American I really am.