Chuckie Watch 22: Chuckie Goes Linguistic

I don't know if CHARLIE DANIELS has mood swings. But, boy, his Soapbox column sure does!

Chuckie's been on the Light Side for his last couple of posts. The most recent one is The Thin Blue Line, which more or less just says that Chuckie likes cops. He does come up with an old saying, "If you think cops are pigs the next time you're in trouble call a hippie."

I guess there's enough 70s-nostalgia shows around that most people would have an idea what a hippie is. A lot of people hearing this saying, though, would probably be asking themselves, "So if you think cops eat too much, call a hippie? What the heck could that mean?"

But Chuckie can be weird even when he's on the Light Side. The one before that was Names. This one shows definite signs of a song that was in the making but got stillborn before it was completed. "Would you check into Joe and Tony’s Hospital for an appendectomy or have a root canal at Chuck E. Cheese’s Dental Clinic?"

I can kind of relate to that. I mean, would you contract out to Halliburton to supply critical material to our soldiers in the Iraq War? Of course not, they might not show up with the stuff, or they might overcharge or, uh, well ... Maybe Chuckie wouldn't like that example.

But my favorite is this:

<< Can you imagine the Mighty Mississippi being called the Afton or the Danube. Naw man, it’s the Big Muddy and those names just don’t fit. Mississippi is a proper name for the biggest river in the country and anything else would sound wimpy. >>

Well, shoot, we wouldn't want to have no sissy river name, now would we? I wonder if Chuckie knows there is a river named the Danube. Is that a sissy name? It's actually called the Donau in German. Does it sound more manly if you say it in German? Dass ist der Donau, Herr Chuckie.

I don't know. Beats me. Maybe he'll make more sense when he goes into the Dark Side. Which should be any day now.