"Dally, ya little weasel," Merle greeted her, "the corn liquor's all gone, I fear, it'll have to be back to the old cow juice for you, real sorry," as he went rummaging in a patent dinner pail filled with ice.
* * * * * * * * * *
In 1893, a father could make a joke about his daughter being an alcoholic without garnering, from nearby witnesses, the kinds of looks usually reserved for a person cannibalizing another person. Even in 1993, you may have gotten away with it, although at least one person would have to exclaim, "You're so bad!" To which you could have responded, "Me?! She's the one with the drinking problem!" You could still make this joke today, as well, of course, but you have to know your audience. Even if the audience is composed of the kind of people who would side-eye and tut-tut a stranger making this kind of joke in public, they'll almost certainly accept as fine and dandy if they know you. That's the main problem with people judging everybody else immediately and on the flimsiest of experiences in this new online world. Most people judge strangers in the harshest context imaginable, barely being able to imagine giving the benefit of the doubt to somebody they've never met before. The main problem is that we just have too much access to too many people now. Somebody online can tell a stupid, throwaway family story about a can of beans, forgetting that the audience for the story is millions of people with no context of anything except the words on the screen, and they'll roast you for it because, obviously, the worst take they can imagine must be the truth.
"cow juice"
Anybody who uses the phrase "cow juice" is a literal monster and should be burned at the stake. Gonna go on Twitter and search "cow juice" and harangue everybody whom I find using it!
"a patent dinner pail"
I guess this was a pail built to hold dinners and keep them cool which was also patented. This is the kind of amazing insights you won't find on other Against the Day wikis. They'd probably ignore this sentence altogether, not realizing that really dumb people might need help clarifying this book too.
"filled with ice"
I began trying to research when humans began to generate their own ice rather than chipping it off of mountains and glaciers and frozen rivers and shipping it all over the world but there were just too many steps to the process and I easily became bored trying to figure it out. Unless the first commercial ice maker was developed in 1854. Which probably means Laura Ingalls was still getting natural ice shipped from some frozen river up north out of the ice shed while Nellie Oleson was filling her root beers with fancy ice purchased by some manufacturer.
