and turn it all about

     My cousin Brian told us about when he was a child in Ohio, he was down by a pond in the woods, and a big snake came out of the water and chased him.

     He escaped the snake:  to describe the run-for-his-life, he said, "I was pickin' 'em up and layin' 'em down!"


     I really loved that turn-of-phrase, and thought I had not heard it ever before.  (Except -- maybe I liked it so much because I had heard it somewhere, and it was a long-buried memory...)

     I could never forget that suspenseful, colorful phrase and stayed alert for opportunities to use it myself, but it never comes into my conversation naturally.

__________________

"I was pickin' 'em up and layin' 'em down!"

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Then about two weeks ago, "The Cosby Show" was on my DVD player:  in a Season 5 episode titled "It Comes And It Goes" Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable receives some teasing criticism from the women in his family, out in the kitchen.

     But when he returns to the men in the living room he tries to give an alternative picture, in which he told the ladies how it was:  and he says, as part of his description, "I told them where to pick it up and where to lay it down."

     ! ! !

            I wondered whether "pick it up and lay it down" might be an expression from a certain part of the country.  I never hear people where I live now say that, and I never heard anyone in Boston say that, when I lived there.

     My cousin Brian lives in Ohio.  Bill Cosby was from Philadelphia... maybe "picking them up and laying them down" is a phrase people got into using in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana.  And maybe Michigan or Kentucky...

     Then yesterday I was reading and re-typing that Rolling Stone review of Fleetwood Mac's first album, and it contained a variation of the phrase:
          "The English continue to prove how well into the blues they really are, and know how to lay it down and shove it back across the Atlantic."

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