| | | Herman: Schumer, leave the Texanisms to Texans
opinion
By Ken Herman - American-Statesman Staff
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 The Straits Times/Xinhua Top leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Kim Jong Un shakes hands with President Donald Trump in Singapore on June 12. THE STRAITS TIMES / XINHUA / ZUMA PRESS / TNS
Posted: 5:36 p.m. Monday, June 18, 2018
I’m always happy when Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, is held up to public ridicule. My animus toward Schumer is apolitical.
It’s based on something more tribal than that — high school. Schumer’s a graduate of James Madison High School in Brooklyn. I attended, until I moved to South Florida, Midwood High School in Brooklyn.
Midwood and Madison are rivals, though please understand that high school rivalries in Brooklyn are not quite at the intensity of high school football rivalries in, say, Odessa. For most New Yorkers, high school is something you pass through, not cling to.
I told you recently about how, when I first came to Texas many years ago, I misidentified an East Texas political candidate as a “tar salesman” when he, in fact, was a tire salesman. Turns out there’s something of a chasm between English as spoken in Brooklyn and English as it’s sort of spoken in the beautiful Pineywoods of East Texas.
As Schumer found out, there’s also a gap between what passes as a biting barb in Brooklyn — you know, something clever like, “So’s your mother” — and what passes as a biting barb in Texas.
It recently fell upon the esteemed senator to criticize President Donald Trump’s recent escapade in Singapore during which our president met with and heaped praise upon a foreign despot. Odd, indeed, but it happened.
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So did Schumer’s Senate floor speech happen last Wednesday, a day after Trump’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Like many, Schumer thought Kim got far more out of the meeting than did Trump, though the latter did seem to enjoy the ceremonial hoopla surrounding the session.
Schumer thought the pomp exceeded the circumstance.
“The summit was much more show than substance,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “What the Texans call ‘all cattle, no hat.’ ”
No, senator not from Texas, that is not what the Texans call “all cattle, no hat.” If you’re going to use our overused Texanisms it behooves you to get them right. When intending to insult somebody for being a phony, a proper Texan says that person is “all hat and no cattle.”
Every Texan, even most of us born in Brooklyn, knows that.
Trump, though born in the New York borough of Queens, does too, or maybe he heard about it from native Texan speaker and current Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Trump took to Twitter (he always takes to Twitter) on Sunday morning to make sure we knew he knew Schumer had screwed up: “Chuck Schumer said ‘the Summit was what the Texans call all cattle and no hat.’ Thank you Chuck, but are you sure you got that right?”
Schumer blew the cliché. But I think he nailed the notion about Trump’s bull.
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