Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 2, 1992 TAG: 9202020018
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
RACING VOCABULARY FOUR WORDS MADE FAMOUS BY RICHARD PETTY
Deal: The only thing Richard Petty has done more than sign his name is utter the word "deal." He uses it constantly. In the garage area, "deal" is a multipurpose word: "I'm not sure what I'm going to do after I quit the driving deal." . . . "Our deal is working well." . . . "After we hit, I don't know what happened with his deal." . . . "The deal is, we just weren't running." . . . "Junior got a good deal on those tires." Cats: This is the runner-up Petty word. "Cat" not only is slang, it's beatnik slang. (History lesson: Beatnik is pre-yuppie and even pre-hippie. Just after Elvis' biggest years, and just before the Beatles, there was a tiny slice of time in which some of the youth of our nation dressed funny, listened to weird poetry, snapped their fingers to jazz and talked funny, saying revolutionary things like, "Yeah, man. That's cool." They also called people "cats.") One might think Petty picked up "cats" from seeing too much of the beatnik Maynard G. Krebs on the "Dobie Gillis" television show 30 years ago. But Lynda Petty said: "I think he started that because when we'd go up North to race years ago, everybody was always saying `guys' and `youse guys.' So he started saying `cats.' " Dadgum: This is Petty profanity. Oh, he will curse for real every once in awhile, but for Petty "dadgum" gets the point across 99 percent of the time. It could have been "gol-darn" or "dang" or "geez." But it isn't. And it's a dadgummed good thing, too, because "dadgum" has more meat to it. Blowed: This is a Petty mispronunciation with a purpose. At Rockingham in 1983, Petty took his 196th career victory by a half-car length over Bill Elliott after a host of other challengers crashed or dropped out with mechanical problems. In Victory Lane, Petty summed it up succinctly: "Couple of 'em crashed, couple of 'em blowed." Heck, he knows as well as you and I that that when a car pukes an engine on the track in the middle of a race, the correct way to describe the misfortune is "a blown engine" or "the engine blew." But to describe the heartbreaking mechanical calamity, you need something more powerful than proper English can provide. That engine didn't just break, it "blowed."Keywords:
AUTO RACING