Listen up, scrunts, and turn the fan off when you leaf

This column was originally published May 18, 2002:

After a recent column on Arizona pioneer Sharlot Hall, I got a note from Richard Sims, director of the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, who was good enough to include a list of Western phrases that Hall had collected in her journals over the years.

If you are going to live in Arizona, old pard, you should start using some of these words so you’ll sound down home. Here are a few:

Bogue: To force oneself where one is not wanted, as in “My masters are bogueing around the newsroom again.”

Dab right down: To come upon or set upon quickly, as in “The other day I wrote leafs when I meant leaves, and readers dabbed right down on it.”

Sloomsey: Ill-fitting or loose, as in “Leafs was a pretty sloomsey spelling.”

Knock a skillet full of hell out of: As in “If one more person mentions that leafs thing, I’m going to knock a skillet full of hell out of them.”

Scrunt: Small or dwarfish, which brings us to today’s question:

You can tell those scrunts on behalf of me, The Arizona Republic, Phoenix Newspapers Inc. and Gannett Co. Inc. that you are absolutely correct.

They are wasting energy by leaving the fans on when nobody’s there.

I double-checked this with Jeff Lane, a spokesman for Salt River Project, who said it’s pretty much the same as leaving lights on in an empty room.

Remember, whippersnappers, the ceiling fan isn’t really cooling the air. It is cooling you by blowing air over your skin, which makes you feel cooler.

But if you’re not there to be cooled, the fan is mostly just pushing air around and burning electricity and costing your poor old parents money.

So turn it off when you leaf.