Xaturated!!! Part One of Language & Stories

Why I'm Going Back to the 1950's. . . .

I’m naturated. Crapurated. Xaturated. No longer infatuated.

With the news, that is. 

Which is why I’ve decided to return to the 1950’s. It seems inevitable anyway. Won’t you join me? Let’s go. . . .

In mid-century, despite the Cold War and children summarily diving under their school desks for pop nuclear bomb quizzes, the country was floating on a dream wave of illusory prosperity. It did not matter how working class your family was, how carefully they counted their pennies or how cramped the apartment. Or perhaps you lived in one of those tiny ticky tacky little shacks on the imagined American prairie. In all cases your boob tube was the altar at which you worshipped, and the presumed reward was that you too could someday strike it rich!

The eponymous TV show, a tad seedy and embarrassingly cloying, was a favorite of American dreamers. People who wrote in with hard luck stories were chosen to stand before a televised audience of millions and shamelessly reveal their own personal tales of horror and destitution, just talk the whole mess out convincingly enough to compete for a monetary misery prize!

Words mattered, and stories even more. Another game show with a similar theme, Queen for a Day, whose title also offered the added distinction of objectifying women, measured the worthiness of an individual’s personal saga of fecklessness with an applause meter. It still remains unclear exactly how such a device actually calculated the depth of one's own deprivation and woe as mirrored and "measured" by the enthusiasm of the gleeful listeners. For some reason though, these events also were remindful of the Elizabethan practice of bear bating, in both the intensity of the animal's shame and the level of spectator thrills even though those furry mammals could not speak, but of course I have bears on the mind, as I will explain shortly. In addition, watching Strike it Rich! you were able say to yourself with some comfort that at least you had a roof over your head, no matter how shabby or leaky.  And you even could dare to dream. . . .

But the overriding favorite of American Dream nighttime TV undoubtedly was The Millionaire, and here’s where my own story of language and yearning comes in.

Aaaah, the inexorable John Beresford Tipton.

You may have heard of this strange benefactor, or possibly even seen episodes of the show. The invisible millionaire- you only get to glimpse his hand delivering the famous check each week as he instructs his suavely cryptic minion Michael Anthony to bestow the million bucks upon some unsuspecting slob- then sits back and voyeuristically observes how this unforseen windfall changes things, for better or for worse. Heh, heh, heh.

John Beresford Tipton. The name exudes privilege. Whiteness. Sons of the Revolution et al, like just about every other show on mid-century TV featuring mainly white people with no "accents," no matter what the level of unhappiness or need. Yes, the name suggests all these things and American Dream Heaven too, but especially if you are the youngest member of an immigrant family who ran for their lives and mainly English is not spoken in your home. If the lexicon that surrounds you in this case happens to be Hungarian, Yiddish, fractured English, a dash of Hebrew, and did I mention Yiddish? Then you hear this name very differently.

 And so John Beresford Tipton becomes:

John Bears Fertipton.

You see, the prefix “fer” runs rampant in Yiddish, as in:

Ferklempt (overcome with emotion)

Ferblondzhet (confused, lost one’s way)

Fermished (totally mixed or messed up)

So in very much wanting to fit in and master the language of the my family's adopted country, and eternally trying to figure out and excel in the multi-adjectived relic of an indo-European dialect as it was now spoken so trippingly off the tongue by descendants of the early colonists, I was determined to figure out both the definition and etymology of the millionaire’s unique title.

 I started with the last name: Fertipten: tipped??? As in, angled or slightly askew? Had to be! Who would keep giving away millions of dollars to perfect strangers? Who would even have this kind of dough? Even then as a child I knew the American Dream had its limits. And you’d have to be a stark, raving madman to part with this bounty so easily. It was clear the guy was  tipped, you know, cracked, soft in the head, the scion of a very wealthy, albeit congenitally (as in overweight and bear-like) insane clan, and thus the name. The ford part no doubt was thrown in and attached to the Bears for luck, perhaps redolent of the legendary auto maker. In addition, we never actually see this madman, further proof he was weird, mentally and physically! A real crackpot, corpulent and excessively hairy, like a bear. This of course explained why he was giving the money away like candy! Clearly, he could never have a life, rich though he was, because he was an oddball. Maybe money wasn’t everything after all!

Which was good to know, since most of us didn’t have it.

You see what I mean about the 1950’s? Such good stories.

C’mon back folks, ‘cause this is where we may be going anyway and I dunno about you, but I wanna get in on the ground floor.

It was so soothing.