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‘Bless your heart:’ Code deciphered

Carolyn Grant

Carolyn Grant

Have you ever heard someone say, ‘well, bless your heart’? Sounds pretty straight forward, yes? But wait, was it delivered by a lady from the south? A Steel Magnolia type? Because if it was, there is a hidden message in there.

I have learned that when a genteel southern woman says “well, bless your heart”, she does not actually mean that.

No, “bless your heart” is actually genteel code for get…. er, lost. Yeah, get lost. That’s the genteel way to put it. A nice code for something else entirely.

Think how handy this knowledge will be for one and all.

For instance, candidate for the BC Liberal leadership Diane Watts might say of Mike de Jong, who threw his hat into the ever-growing ring of candidates for Party leadership, “Another candidate has declared? Mike de Jong? Well, bless his heart.”

Or perhaps a resident of Puerto Rico, devastated by Hurricane Maria, might say the same to President Donald Trump.

Trump tweeted this week that Texas and Florida were doing just fine after Hurricane Irma but implied that Puerto Rico was somehow deficient in its bounce-back-ability due to broken infrastructure and massive debt. Yup, he piled on victims of a natural disaster. He also seems to have only recently discovered that Puerto Rico is an island. Bless his heart. He is slowly starting to understand that just because he says he is doing a tremendous job on assisting with hurricane recovery on the newly discovered island, others do not agree.

Meanwhile, athletic protests dominated the weekend, as football players, and one baseball player, took the knee during the American national anthem. The whole situation is so tangled, so interpreted, then reinterpreted, then mis-interpreted, that the man who began the whole thing, former San Francisco quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, has been lost. As has his message and his reasons for doing so. Kaepernick began taking a knee during the anthem last season to protest racial inequality and police actions against black people in America.

But then last Friday, President Trump, who has to distill his thoughts down to 140 characters because Twitter, jumped in and said that any athlete taking a knee during the anthem was disrespecting the flag. Also called them SOBs and said they should be fired. This certainly fired people up. Over 250 football players took a knee on the weekend. Even those arch-conservative NFL owners linked arms with their players. Of course, those arch-conservative NFL owners are also denying Kaepernick a job in the league for doing exactly the thing that they were standing up for on Sunday. They’ve perfected the art of having it both ways, bless their hearts.

Some teams who may have paid the White House a championship visit have decided not to go, one being the Golden State Warriors of basketball. But the Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins will visit. And that landed Canadian hockey icon Sidney Crosby in hot water, as many said he shouldn’t visit Trump. Crosby says the visit is an apolitical tradition, which is fair enough. Others don’t agree. But it’s an individual decision. I guess if you ever meet Sidney Crosby, you could say, “going to see the President, are you Sidney? Well, bless your heart.”

Oh, and here’s some good news for Trump and the world. Twitter is experimenting with allowing tweets with 280 characters. That should expand the President’s foreign policy substantially. How many more hilarious nicknames for Kim Jong Un can he come up with now? Bless his heart.

Carolyn Grant is Editor of the Kimberley Bulletin