I arrived at the nursing home while my mother was working with a physical therapist. Her nurse for the day encouraged me to go to the physical therapy gym to watch Mom doing her exercises.

Mom looked tired and a little red in her face, but she was using a walker correctly with the help of a staff member. In need of a perm, Mom’s white hair, straight and a little shaggy, covered her forehead. Looking up at me, she tried to joke as she had in the past when something hurt. She said with a dramatic sigh, “Oh! My aching pinfeathers!”

I laughed, despite knowing that she was having pain caused by arthritis. My family had a cartoon inspired vocabulary that we often used even when something bothering us wasn’t a laughing matter.

Comic books drawn and written by Carl Barks were a part of my family as I grew up. Daddy bought them each week for ten or fifteen cents apiece while in town to have oats ground for cow feed. Each member of the family read all the comic books many times, enjoying the funny pictures and storylines. Barks introduced his miserly character, Scrooge McDuck in 1947. Scrooge frequently suffered from ‘aching pinfeathers’. This mysterious ailment troubled him whenever his three-acre money bin was about to be broken into by the wicked Beagle Boys.

Another comic book word that entered my family’s vocabulary was ‘pixilated’. It came from Carl Bark’s story about a pixilated parrot who memorized Scrooge’s vault combination before flying off. The vault held “ninety tons of money”. Afraid the combination would fall into the wrong hands, Scrooge and his nephew Donald, and his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie chase after the parrot. In love with another parrot, the troublesome bird manages to get the Ducks shanghaied and they end up in ancient Persia where they discover a lost city.

Pixilated is coined from the word ‘pixie’ meaning a cheerful, mischievous sprite. People (or parrots) who are pixilated are defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as being bemused or mentally unsound.

My education by Carl Barks never ends. The word ‘pixelated’ sounds just like ‘pixilated’, but the one spelled with an ‘e’ instead of an ‘i’ describes how digital images are made up of many small dots: pixels. The more there are, the clearer the picture. What I find interesting is that in 1886, two artists by the name of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac came up with an art form called pointillism, which is applying small dabs or dots to a canvas so that from a distance the dots blend together and just the overall picture is seen. They discovered the same concept used by digital pixels, but over one hundred years before the invention of computers!

At first, I wasn’t sure where the phrase ‘hip-a-hoola’ came from when it popped into my mind recently. I couldn’t remember any comic book stories that used those words. Then I remembered. As a young nursing assistant at the hospital, I worked with several women who were young brides during the second world war. One lady liked to joke around and used several slang terms from the 1940’s. When she said we were going to have a ‘hip-a-hoola’, I didn’t know what that meant.

Walking makes my hip hurt lately, so I’ve been thinking to myself, “My ‘hip-a-hoola’ hurts!” This phrase causes me to remember a big craze for hula hoops when I was growing up in the 1950’s. Everyone wanted to own one of those colorful plastic hoops. To use one, a person had to move their hips in a circular motion to keep the hoop spinning around their midsection. Ouch! Thinking about that sort of movement makes my ‘hip-a-hoola’ hurt!

I finally asked my computer what those words meant to the slang-inventing soldiers. According to the information I found ‘hip-a-hoola’ meant a sense of camaraderie or celebration. That certainly isn’t what I thought it meant! I thought it was like having achy pinfeathers.

In the end it all makes sense to me. A doctor at the clinic said it was time for me to get my right hip joint replaced. Soon, my hip joint will enjoy a ‘hip-a-hoola’ (camaraderie) in a surgical suite with a friendly orthopedic surgeon.