Scaring the Dickens into me

 

Scaring the Dickens out of someone is one of those phrases you use but never really think about...until you are looking for a blog post title and want some context. The phrase actually has nothing to do with Charles Dickens. The first recorded use was in the late 1590s when Shakespeare used it in The Merry Wives of Windsor when one of the characters says, "I cannot tell what the dickens his name is." 

Apparently Dickens was a nickname for the devil and a way of swearing without evoking the devil's name.  It's kind of like telling someone to go to heck instead of go to hell. 

What the fudge?

I actually didn't set out to write about the origins of  scaring the dickens out of someone. I just keep trying to find new challenges for ChatGPT for creating alter ego images of me. So I asked it to give me a Dickens-esque image of me from Victorian times. I knew if I asked it to make me into Charles Dickens the lawyer algorithms would kick in and say something about not messing around with images of real people.  If came up with an image of me that looks better than Charles Dickens if I do say so myself.

I always wanted a formal portrait of me. It is one of those ego things tied to my desire to be famous without the downside of...well, being famous.  Many years ago, I dated an artist who actually painted a couple of large oil paintings of me. One was sitting in my backyard playing the guitar and the other was an image of me in an old tux with tails I'd found. They were actually pretty good.  I got to keep the portraits after the relationship ended but they were pretty large and it is awkward to have portraits of yourself hanging around. Plus they were of me in my 30s and though cool, they wouldn't have been a fair representation of me now. 

Regardless, when I first got married and we were moving out of my house and storing stuff to get ready for a move to a house I'd bought with my wife, I packed stuff in the back of my pickup truck to take to a storage locker. The two paintings were in the back of the truck and I hadn't done a great job of securing the load and while I was on the freeway both paintings flew out of the truck and went god knows where. I tried pulling over, but it was a busy freeway and there was no sign of the paintings.

So there went the only real portraits of me that were ever painted. I wonder sometimes where they ended up. Did someone find them? Did they just rot in the bushes and trees that lined the freeway? It would have been cool if I actually found them on sale in a Goodwill at some point. That would have been ironic. 

Don't you think?