Darn you
Midas Mulligan, now you've got me adding up everyone's formation numbers to make sure they come out to 10!
Sorry. It's one of those things I think my brain does without me consciously thinking about it. It only sets off alarms if something seems off. The bells were chiming like crazy so I re-read and consciously did the math. Yep. TOO MANY!
So the "TOO MANY" is me being self-indulgent. One Christmas, my brothers and I had to get out of the folks' house, so we drove two hours to the casino to get drunk and gamble in honor of the birth of our Lord and Savior. There was this real bitch blackjack dealer who happened to be Vietnamese (large Viet. population on the coast). She was not funny, nor charming and was clearly herself an immigrant (eta: is first gen the right term?). She would rip those cards off that deck when you took a hit and invariably busted, and every damn time she would say in a very English-isn't-my-first language-but-I'm-also-fucking-with-you, taunting kind of way, "TOO MANY!". She obviously didn't quite understand the dynamic of her role and that she would make more if we won rather than lost, as she wasn't going to get a cut, but not to be deterred, we kept drinking and losing money and started joining her in saying it with every bust hand she dealt.
The night ended with us getting a shitty comped buffet at 4 in morning for which we effectively paid $500 per person. Since then, in my head anyway, I can only read or write the phrase "TOO MANY" in her voice.
As yet another side note, one of the most interesting forms of English, broken as it may be, that I've ever come across is spoken by many of first generation Vietnamese immigrants down there. Since my untrained ears don't do very well distinguishing among the accents of Asian languages, the best way I can describe it is imagine the last time you ordered take out (like before Seamless last time) across a difficult language barrier. Then imagine that the lady on the phone had learned English by listening to Jeff Foxworthy clips, everything from accent and enunciation to phrasing and terminology. When you get that in your mind, you'll get it.
I love it when I hear it, as it's so unexpected. It reminds me what a wonderfully eclectic cultural soup we have in the USA, even if how it's made is an ever-evolving recipe. And just as delightful to me are little reminders, such as this unusual and pocketed dialect, of how local color really exists and geography matters, regardless of what the "national", i.e., bi-coastal, media tells you.
Yeah, so now this is in a matchday thread. Sorry, not sorry. I said I was indulging myself.