Kansas Three - Text
Caucasian male, 51 years old. Born in Kassel, Germany, November 5, 1947. Raised in Kansas City. He is university educated, and received both his undergraduate and Law Degrees from the University of Kansas. He was stationed (U.S. Army) in Wurzberg, Germany for a year during the Vietnam war. At the time of the recording, he was a professional speaker. He is the father of Kansas dialect speaker one and husband to Kansas two. Recorded/edited by Shawn M. Muller, August 24, 1999.
TRANSCRIPTION
It’s funny that we’re talking about words and people’s reactions to them. (Uh) I remember that, my first job out of law school was I was a real estate attorney for the Army Corps of Engineers. And I was sent out one day to do a field investigation on a farmer, who had sold his land to the government, and then had actually harvested corn off of that land, about two months later. Well, I came back to the office, and I dictated into a dictation machine the tape which was then going to go to a typing pool. Yes, once upon a time there was such a creature. (Ah) I dictated the following: that the previous landowner had usufructuary rights to the emblements of the demised premises.
So I wait for my letter, and I wait for my letter. No letter. So I go marching down to the typing pool, and I go, “Hey! Marjorie! Where’s my letter?”
And she says, “Get away from me. You nasty young man.”
I go, “Oooh, whoa, what did I say that was wrong?” Well, the part she didn’t understand was that the word usufructuary means that you have the rights to the fruits of someone else’s land.
And she said to me, “What were you trying to say?”
And so I said, “Look, Marjorie, this farmer owned the ground, right? He plants the corn be-- while he still owns the ground. The corn pops up through the topsoil before he sells the ground. That makes the corn his personal property, even though now it’s the fruits of someone else’s land. That’s what allowed him to go back on the land to collect it.”
So what did Marjorie say to me that day? “So why didn’t you just say so?”
UNSCRIPTED SPEECH TRANSCRIBED BY JACQUELINE BAKER, ASSOCIATE EDITOR FOR TRANSCRIPTIONS, March 11, 2008