Last Saturday evening at Fort McDowell Adventures we were entertained by a cowboy kind of a guy who recited a ballad around the theme of “pert near.”

He didn’t think us high-falutin’ white collar folk from Fountain Hills would dare dabble in the use of “pert near” in our paper.

He obviously has not read my column recently.

I pert near fell off the picnic table bench when I heard him utter those words (I swear it had nothing to do with the number of Beck’s dark beers I had imbibed that evening). Why, “pert near” is a highly technical journalistic term that we have been instructed over the eons to use sparingly in our prose.

Over use leads to abuse, and then pretty soon someone pert near gets canned by a writing coach because of cliché abuse on the job. I was pert near going to refer to the term “King of Pop” as cliché abuse, but then thought better of it.

Modern-day cowboys – you know, the ones who pack heat on one side of their hip and a Blackberry on the other – seem to think they own the “pert near” domain among linguists and journalists, as if you need to be wearing Wranglers and dusty boots alongside a campfire to utter that type of vernacular amid the fireflies and howling coyotes.

Pshaw!

I was pert near 23 years old when I crossed the border into Arizona from New Mexico and was accosted by a guy wearing a green uniform and a funny-looking hat standing in a small glass booth.

“Got any vegetables in there?” he asked.

No.

“Well, I pert near arrested you, being a sworn deputy from the Department of Agriculture, since we are on the lookout for vagrants like you who try to smuggle in produce from other jurisdictions. With vegetables come other varmints that we don’t want here in the Grand Canyon State.

“Now get along little doggie and take the little missus.”

So I naturally figured that “pert near” was how everyone talked in Arizona and worked it into my copy over the years as I covered various beats in Fountain Hills as a cub reporter.

“The Road District Board pert near held a hanging party last week as members negotiated with MCO Properties officials over a road-paving agreement” read one of the first stories I ever wrote for The Times in the 1980s.

The 1990s, of course, brought with it a new town government and plenty of growth.

“The cactus huggers pert near lost their prickly needles when they heard the proposed zoning by the property owner was going to be C-3” was the lead of a story from 1993.

The developers fought back, however, as evidenced by this news report I filed a few years later: “The developer spent pert near $500,000 in legal fees battling the town in naming rights for the Fountain.”

The developer pert near won that battle to call the Fountain the “World’s Tallest Fountain as brought to you by the McCulloch Chainsaw Company,” but in the end sweet justice prevailed.

Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation then tried to annex Fountain Hills, arguing it existed long before this planned community did.

“Fountain Hills is pert near a suburb of Fort McDowell anyway” they argued in court, but the justice system wouldn’t hear of it.

“Fort McDowell Adventures is pert near a country unto itself,” one justice argued. “They just do things differently out there. That tequila bus is pert near nirvana. Fountain Hills? They’re just a bunch of hillbilly hicks.”

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