Talking heads. Nine yards? Cement mixer. The Oregon Trail. Dog for dinner. East meets west.

How people talk . . . Conversational gambit: The bouncer-careener. Someone says, "In South Carolina there has been widespread discrimination against left-handed people." The other says, "I was in South Carolina last summer, and the mosquitoes were bad for such a beautiful state."

Or one says SC is beautiful, making SC the Beautiful the topic, and the other responds saying SC discriminates against left-handers. In either case, the first is told he has nothing to say that the second wants to pursue, for whatever reason, from simple boredom to raging hostility or from a motorized mouth that spits out whatever comes to mind.

The mind in this third case is a sort of roller derby, in which words encounter other words, careening and bumping each other in a riot of suggestion. Out comes the suggested, and off goes the conversation in a new direction.

The scholars' corner . . . You hear "the whole nine yards" as synonymous with the "whole ball of wax," the whole thing, all the content of whatever you're talking about. I'd been thinking football, and some say "go the whole nine." But nine gets you second down in football, which isn't enough.

No, it's not football but cement mixers. Nine cubic yards is said (inaccurately) to be the capacity of a cement mixer — name of quite a song, by the way — like those behemoths you see moving down the street, dusty and rotund, on their way to a construction site.

So it's the whole nine cubic yards. But a cement mixer holds 4 1/2 cubic yards, which is only half of nine, even in ou postmodern age. Or the bigger version (family size, get out of its way) is 6 1/2 yards, which doesn't compute at all for us seeking method in the whole-nine madness.

Still, cement-mixing seems to win. And we mix metaphors, don't we? There's a cement industry newsletter called "The Whole Nine Yards." More later on how to get a copy of this seminal publication.

History . . . Riding the Oregon Trail in 1846, U.S. historian Francis Parkman was offered a woman for his horse. It was in the camp of a Plains Indian tribe, the Dakota. The man offering the woman was her father, who coveted Parkman's mount. Parkman declined. The man already had 30 horses and was the richest man in the village. He was 300 pounds of avarice, but cheerful about it. He rode away chuckling. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Women of this tribe of noble savages were trophies. Braves lolled with their favorite wives. This favorite remained at a brave's side, carrying among other things his pipe. One favorite grinned winsomely at Parkman. There was no tomorrow for her, the favorite squaw as long as her looks held out. When they left her, it was another matter.

Work in camp or village was done largely by women one or two generations past trophy status. These hags labored mightily. The men fought and hunted when need be but otherwise did nothing. The men had status, women had only what men bestowed on them.

Hello, dog-lovers, wherever you are . . . Providing a hair of the dog that bit you (a medicinal shot the morning after, term dates from 1546) had a meaning all its own for the Oglala Sioux, or Dakota, whom Francis Parkman spent time with on the Oregon Trail. For them it was providing the whole dog.

He watched a woman pick up a plump puppy from the litter snoozing in her father's lodge, hammer it repeatedly on its head until it was dead, swing it over the fire until its hair was singed off, cut it into little pieces, and toss it into a boiling pot.

From that came a "dog feast" for Parkman and his doctor friend who had been fixing what ailed the Indians. It was offered in gratitude and had to be eaten, lest offense be given.

Parkman’s Sioux . . . As a bookish New England youngster, Parkman developed great interest in the Indians of the West and decided he had to live with them to do the subject justice. That's what he did on the Oregon Trail (from Independence, Missouri) in 1846, and from the experience came his book of the same name. He's billed as a historian but seems also to have been a cultural anthropologist.

He found the Indians -- Dakota, or Sioux -- curious about things but only within limits. What went beyond their experience they called "great medicine" and let go at that. They let sleeping dogs lie -- metaphorically if not really. When they wanted a good meal, as we have seen, a dog feast was much appreciated.

The trail was used mostly by "emigrants," woodsmen and their families pushing ahead in wagon trains to the promised land -- pioneers. At Fort Laramie, gateway to the Rockies, where emigrants stopped, Indians inspected everything, even private quarters, "totally devoid of any sense of delicacy or propriety,” said Parkman.

The travelers were dangerously ignorant of the country they were passing through and of its inhabitants. And fearful, viewing even Parkman and his companion as enemies because they were strangers.

Their fearfulness got them into trouble. When Dakotas came looking for food, they gave it in overabundance, afraid to refuse. The Dakotas, spotting easy marks, upped their demands and got nasty, at which point one of the emigrants would pull out a rifle and threaten them.

It didn't help any that about this time the Dakotas were getting nervous about these strangers. A few trappers were no problem. But as wagon trains appeared, full of palefaces, it dawned on them that there was trouble ahead. Their neighborhood was threatened.

— More to come of these tales of the West —