By Jim Hagarty
One of the challenges for a writer is to not leave his readers behind. It is easy to do. One way to lose them is to use references they don’t understand. I try hard not to do that but I don’t always succeed. I sometimes uses cultural references that might be lost on some readers, in part because of my age. Recently, for example, I wrote about how voters took the members of a political party “to the woodshed” in Canada’s most recent national election. What does taking someone to the woodshed mean? And what is a woodshed, anyway? Woodsheds were common when people heated their homes with fireplaces and woodstoves. Wood for burning would be kept dry in a shed dedicated for that. And why would someone be taken to the woodshed? In the old days of corporal punishment, a father would take his kid to the woodshed to administer a smacking. The threat was always there? “Do you want a trip to the woodshed, boy? Well, just keep it up.”
Also, in a story about a one-room schoolhouse of old, I used the expression, “the three R’s”. What could that possibly be? The three R’s referred to Readin’, Ritin’, and ‘Rithmetic.
