If you don't care

Last week we took a hiatus from posting here because we were not actually living in the RV last week.  We were living in a beach house with a bunch of friends at Nags Head, NC.  As a senior nurse anesthesia student, I don't get a lot of time off.  This was a terrific way to spend a week and our little monster was in a really good mood the whole time, which made vacation even more awesome.

There are a few interesting cultural / linguistic gems I've noticed in Pikeville, and that was actually the inspiration for this post.  The ubiquitous "Coal keeps the lights on!" bumper stickers are hard to miss starting in about Coeburn, Va., and the inclusion of the "black lung" check box in the respiratory section of the paper pre-op form are both telling.  Frequently our older male patients are retired miners.  These were obvious or predictable culturalisms though.

Here's an odd one.  Pink is way in fashion.  I'd venture to guess about half of all women in Pikeville are wearing pink at any given time, and half of the pink-wearers are wearing hot pink.  Hot pink, for real?  Are we stuck in the 80s here, or is pink back?  Don't know.

As a linguistic nerdy nerd who took a whole college class on English dialects, I really like the following dialectic idiom.  The phrase "if you don't care" is routinely substituted for "if you don't mind."  I probably hear this 10 times a day at the hospital.  For example, a CRNA might say to the tech "we'll need the a fiber optic scope in the room if you don't care."  (I also love that "care" is pronounced /kir/, or "keer" if you don't read IPA.)  Today I heard this substitution in a way which I now consider to be ambiguous in  meaning.  The context was my CRNA said "I don't care to do it that way" in reference to a suggestion I made.  Previously I would have interpreted that as a rejection of my idea, but I now know in Pikeville it is the opposite.