Sleep
Let’s think about something else for a minute, besides how we’re all going to come down with something called yaws probably. I’ve got two reading recs and a question. Let’s start with the question.
When you wake up, and there’s a substance in the corner of your eye…
Loading ...Trying to determine whether gesturing at a loved one’s face and saying “you have sleep in your eye” was specific to my family, a regionalism, which regionalism, etc. Hop down to the comments and say more if you like!
“Well, I’ve got end-times insomnia, WHY NOT.” Yeah, I feel you. I have a couple of reading recs that might help. The first is James Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen, which should be required reading for all Americans, and if we ever get out of this dystopian pickle, I hope I’ll live to see it happen. I wouldn’t call it cheery or heartening, Lord knows, but Baldwin’s crisply furious prose has a clarifying effect, I find.
Quite a bit more invigorating is Aaron Lansky’s Outwitting History. I reviewed Lansky’s account of his and his team’s quest to preserve Yiddish literature years ago, and adored it then; I’d like to reread it now, because I recall a determined bailing-with-a-teaspoon hopefulness that a culture that fascists tried to exterminate could survive. We need stories like that right now, so we can get psyched to live them ourselves.
That’s all I got: eye gunk and reprints. Hope y’all are hanging in.
Tags: Aaron Lansky books James Baldwin our friend English
When I was in college, I had a summer job at a magazine, and this topic came up. I forget what they called it — “gunk” or “crud” or “eye boogers” or whatever — but when I said “sleep” they actually laughed at me and said that wasn’t a thing. That seriously made me wonder for decades whether it was just a my-family (or possibly Southern) thing, until I started hearing other people say it too.
I’ve heard it called “sleep” most often, but the expression in my family was “sleepyseeds”.
Also, don’t the Monkees agree with us? cf. the lyrics of “Daydream Believer”.
I’ve always thought that was more of a metaphorical way of saying “wake up,” versus referring to a physical piece of gunk?
I kind of think it’s all the same thing. Like the metaphor includes the possibility of gunk.
I had to stare at that poll an embarrassingly long time. Did I call it sleep when I was a kid? Did I just read that? I wouldn’t call it that now, but I know I have shed other words. Having moved around a bit for school, and interacting with people from all over, it has become difficult to pin down my “native” vocabulary from words I learned from books, or from my college roommate, or from my graduate school friends.
West Midlands, UK perspective – in my family it’s always been sleep. Now I think about it though, isn’t that a strange turn of phrase?
In the midwest, we always called it sleep. In California I’ve always heard sleep. The young folks call it eye boogers.
My brother and I were obsessed with yaws at the tender age of 10 and 12 respectively, after we came across the entry in either a medical book or encyclopedia we were reading. We spent a solid month or two accusing each other or our parents of having it upon detecting a scratched-open bug bite. We were weird kids.
Speaking of weird, my family called eye-corner substances “sleep” while I was growing up. Sometime in my early adulthood, I started calling it “crust”, but I don’t know where that came from. An ex-boyfriend from that era called them “eye boogers”, which was the first I’d heard of that. My ex-spouse called it “something”, “stuff”, or “gunk” usually, but our tween daughter calls it interchangeably “something” or “stuff” (from him), “crust” (from me), or “eye boogers” (from her peers) depending on who she’s talking to or about.
When I was small, growing up in Michigan, my family always called them “sleepies” or “crusties”. Having moved away, I now usually use crusties or eye boogers because “sleepies” gets me a blank look in Colorado.
In michigan too, and also sleepies (never “sleep”) or crusties.