Posted on 08/17/2016 11:53:04 AM PDT by Gamecock
I guess I was you young and stupid at the time, but when it came time to selling doughnuts for local school activities, Murphy Village was the first and only place I’d go. Drive up, park centrally, and they’d line up to buy them. I’d usually be in and out of there in 20-30 minutes and my job would be complete.
Never had any troubles.
There was a crew that screwed up the front steps of pretty much every house on my block. They would come up and offer a great price to replace brick steps. I had just removed my own brick steps a few months before, and I knew what a pain it was to remove the bricks and masonry. I removed everything, including the foundation, because I was replacing with wooden steps, which my wife prefers... Yeah, I know...
This crew came in, and instead of removing the old steps, or at least the top course, they just went over them with new brick and faux concrete slates and raised the landing to just below the door opening. If they had to pitch the landing into the house to make it happen, they did so. If the bottom step wound up three inches too tall, they would just pile up dirt in front of it to hide it. Furthermore, they ran the slate landing right up to the ledger board under the door, and this mortar-to-wood connection wound up rotting out on pretty much every single house.
It was crap work. They did the house two down from me and pitched me on the same job. I went to look at the completed house, and saw the puddle against the ledger board, and said no thank you. I tried to warn my neighbors, but I was new in the neighborhood and they figured I didn’t know what I was talking about.
They were in the neighborhood for a couple of months and they just drove away.
;-)
A dialect is a cant, cant is not a dialect.
A cant is a dialect, vernacular, or “lingo”. “Cant” is not a particular dialect.
They aren’t ‘Irish Travelers’ they are grifters and thieves.....pure and simple
I remember living in St Petersburg FL in the 60s when the news paper had big headlines exhorting all to beware! the Terrible Williamsons were sweeping into town. Don’t let anyone you don’t know resurface your driveway or fix your roof! etc. I remember my neighbhood being inundated with these fix-it people going door to door and sometimes while the householder was answering the front door someone else was going in the back door.
The Irish Tinkers are NOT Gysies. There is not much difference in their habits, though.
Figured I’d see you here.
Black paint or used motor oil.
If they call it Cant then Cant is, indeed, the name for that mode of speech.
Qunn Martin’s “The Year Of The Locusts” episode of The Streets Of San Francisco.
LOL!! I was just looking around for my old “travelers” ping list, but it must be on my old broken computer...
They speak in a cant. That cant has various names depending on the group.
Look it up.
The Terrible Williamsons called it Cant. I know what cant is and argot and slang and lingo and all that. When a group puts a capital letter on it then it becomes a name that does not necessarily closely reflect the meaning of the uncapitalized word.
Do you recall the last names which most of them share. There is one in particular but I can’t remember it. Williamson is probably one of them but not the most common.
The Celts invaded the British Isles and were contested by somebody. I doubt its was elves, fairies and leprechauns!
I had some of them try to pull that speaker scam on me years ago. I’d like to think I was too smart, but the reality was that my car was too small to stow the speaker boxes and I was on my way to work.
They may call it “The Cant” yet “The Cant” of American Irish and Scottish tinkers is a cant mutually unintelligible with each other. There are multiple dialects calling themselves “The Cant”.
I am not sure who the earliest inhabitants were but there were Celtic tribes around the time of Christ. Ireland was invaded by a tribe called “Scots” who then settled the islands and eventually went to Scotland where they again fought with native Celts.
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