Small-town screwballs and surprises

In a 1925 essay, Freud unearthed an important linguistic truth about the concept of the uncanny (unheimlich). He noticed that it had drifted very close to its apparent antonym heimlich, which starts out as ‘homely’ and can, via ‘private and personal’, become ‘secretive and repressed’. This enabled him to offer the more important psychological insight that things closest to home can be the most disconcerting, that often the familial is really the least familiar.

J. Robert Lennon has written a book of 100 anecdotes — between a couple of paragraphs and a couple of pages long — that chart the unpredictable nature of small-town life in middling America. And his use of the uncanny is, well, canny. He introduces us, very briefly, to such modestly eccentric locals as a woman who spells out the letters of every word instead of saying it, a man who can only cope sanely with human interaction by dressing and acting exactly like his psychiatrist, or

two professors of literature who were good friends until one night, at a party, when they entered into a debate about the proper spelling of a certain word.