Jill, Jesse, and I were standing in line at Home Depot waiting for the strangely senile old woman clerk to finish ringing us up when she lifted an unmarked item out of our shopping cart.
She struggled with it for a bit, searching for a barcode or Item #. After a few moments of confusion Jesse said mildly, “it’s probably free.”
to which the woman replied: “OH! THEN YOU’LL TAKE IT AND THEN I SUPPOSE I’LL SEE YOU AT THE HOOSEGOW!”
hoosegow?
The lady figured out the unmarked item eventually, we paid, and upon reaching the parking lot Jill asked Jesse:
“what did that woman say to you?”
“She said ‘and then i suppose I’ll see you at the hoosegow,” Jesse replied, “I have NO idea what Hoosegow means, but it’s used in a Red hot chili pepper’s song. And it really bothers me that that senile old lady knows it and I don’t. That senile old lady is cooler than me.”
We got back to the house and asked all of our party guests what Hoosegow meant, and no one had a clue. we ended up looking it up in a scrabble dictionary. It turns out it means ‘jail.’ Imagine that. The old lady wasn’t so senile after all.
Sadly, Mike, I knew exactly what that old lady meant by
“hoosegow” and have actually used it once or twice myself
(like, “mark my words, he’ll end up in the hoosegow”). So
that either makes me an old lady or a Red Hot Chili Peppers
fan….hmmmm, I wonder which one it is……
Her mind is a hoosegow for words.
You know, I told a bunch of people the hoosegow story and they all knew what it meant and thus ruined any potential funniess.
Any funny story that depends on a lapse of vocabulary is a risky one to tell. But, I’m suprised so many people know that word. It’s so random.
The best part of the story is that you used the scrabble dictionary to look up the word.
scrabble!