I Am Sophistihickated

"I could really eat some brisket," said my friend Connie.

Now that is not a comment you hear just anywhere.  It is most often heard in the Southern States of the US of A. Oklahoma is in the Southwest, but it has a bit of a Southern twang about it. Part cowboy, part mid-west.  It's hard to explain unless you are here.

Brisket, for my UK audience is a skirt steak that is slowly roasted.  Slowly because this particular cut of beef is very stringy and chewy if not cooked slowly over a period of at least a day.  My mom uses Liquid Smoke to give it a sort of hickory flavor.  Others use the mesquite version.  Mostly Texans, though.  When cooked properly brisket melts in your mouth and is super tender.  It is, what I call a "hick" food.  But just because you eat or even like brisket does not make you a hick.  But it does perhaps point to one's hickey roots, as in the case of my family.  We are about 2-3 generations away from hick.  (My paternal great-grandfather was a cowboy and his wife was at one time the Sheriff of Johnson County, Wyoming while the men-folk were off fighting Indians in the Powder River War.) We are now mostly edumacated people.  

As for Connie, I don't know about her hick lineage.  She may be the granddaughter of the lost Tatiana for all I know. She has a couple of higher education degrees, has in fact just received a half million dollar grant, which she penned herself to create housing for HIV+ people.  Hicks usually don't like "queers" although some queers like brisket, but they might choose to call brisket "pot au feu." 

And then there is the whole Jewish side of the brisket.  They are not hicks.  I think Judaism, by its very nature precludes hickieness.  Yet I have met some pretty hickey Jews in Texas.

So what does that make us, those descendants of hicks who are all lettered up?  I believe it makes us sophistihicks.  We are sophitihickcated.