The Origin of the One Biscuit Hound

You know how each family has it's own lexicon? Words or phrases that are born from an experience and just stick? Familial slang, passed on through the generations along with hammer toes and cow-licks.

My father grew up in utter poverty, in rural southern Illinois. We are Grade A hillbilly mutt stock! We watch O Brother, Where Art Thou? and just howl with laughter. Not at it, but totally with it. Dad was the youngest of six children, abandoned by his father when he was 3 years old. They lived in one-room shacks and all six kids shared one bed, three across the top and three across the bottom. He and his closest brother owned one shirt and one jacket between them, so they took turns each day wearing one of them. One of my father's worst memories from school was when a teacher made him remove his jacket only to discover that he had no shirt underneath.

One of the games Dad and his siblings used to entertain themselves with involved throwing stale biscuits to the stray hounds loitering around, and then throwing a rock to see if the dog would eat it. The really smart dogs had to be given several pieces of biscuit before they would fall for the rock trick. The dumb ones would try to eat the rock after only one biscuit. And thus was born the term "one biscuit hound." The poor man had no idea that he would actually procreate the epitome of a one biscuit hound in human form!

So now you know. I like to joke that my parents really scraped the bottom of the DNA barrel when they made me. Genetic backwash, if you will. I was destined to one-biscuit it through life.