Letting the Raw Side Drag

If you love words and enjoy knowing the meaning and etymology of phrases, if you're a language and grammar junkie, like me, check out A WAY WITH WORDS on National Public Radio.  Martha and Grant are geniuses  at tracking down meanings. http://www.waywordradio.org/category/episodes/


My daddy was known for his quips, some original, some borrowed.  The ones he coined became part of our family's shared vocabulary.  Every family has some of these, sayings that pop up in conversation and mean nothing to anyone who wasn't there. (This reminds me of the Sixties phrase, "You had to be there,"--which meant that whatever happened "there" is beyond verbal description.)

1.

Once, on a fishing trip, Will and my daddy stopped at a cafe where the coffee served was lukewarm.

"Could I have a hot cup?  This one is cold," Lloyd said to the waitress.

"What should I do with this cup?" she replied--referencing the coffee she'd just served him.

"I don't care," he said.  "Pour it out somewhere."

Occasionally, all these years later, one of us says "Pour it out somewhere," and it seems to mean something like this: "I don't care what you do with it" or "Duh!"

2.

"Let the raw side drag."  I took this phrase to be a kind of general permission-giving, as in "Just do what you want, never mind what anyone thinks."

He said it to me once when we were taking a walk.  "Linda, you're just letting the raw side drag."  Since he said it with a smile and a twinkle in his eyes, I took it to be a kind of thumbs up for whatever  I happened to be doing at the time.

Maybe I'll call Martha and Grant this morning, see if they know the etymology of "Raw Side Dragging."  So far, the closest I've found is "Let the rough side drag" from a song by Jesse Montgomery:

Let the rough side drag
Let the smooth side show
While you pull that load
Everywhere you go...

3.

"Keep the main thing the main thing."

While he didn't make this one up, it was his favorite bit of advice for grandkids.  He never actually specified what the "main thing" was--which I liked.

4.

Many American idioms of his generation are agrarian and practical sayings:

"It takes two to pull the wagon."

"He's the black sheep of the family."

"It's not worth a hill of beans."

"Look at her--living so high on the hog!"