One lump or two?

One of my mother's favorite lines from way back is, "Don't just stand there with your teeth in your mouth."

It meant, in her vernacular, that we should do something useful, and not that we needed to see a dentist.

But another saying of hers always seemed to me to defy sense or meaning: "If they don't like it, they can lump it." As in when my mother - who had a lot of short-term, part-time jobs - made so many demands on employers, we made a joke of one of them: "I can't work on days that begin with T and I need the whole summer off. If they don't like it, they can lump it."

Lump it. So just what did that mean? I don't know what took me so long, but I Googled the answer.  Turns out it does have a sensible meaning after all, according to the Cambridge Dictionary: If you tell someone to like it or lump it, you mean that they must accept a situation they don't like because it won't be changed. 

But what exactly does lump mean in this usage? According to Dictionary.com, it means to receive or endure something unpleasant, such as hardship, punishment or criticism. To "take your lumps," as it were.

Which is why mom said to the manager of another employer - I believe it was Taco Bell - "I'm not working at the drive-thru window on a cold day without a sweater. If you don't like it, you can lump it."

(That job, I must add, lasted only days. It is among dozens of others, both of shorter and longer duration. You should hear what she had to say about one day at Bob's Big Boy.)

Understanding mom's phrase was one thing. But then hearing it from someone else? That's a new one. And the speaker was none other than Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Donald Trump now serving time at a federal prison in Connecticut because he defied a congressional subpoena.

Something tells me he isn't in the kind of prison where he's sleeping on a rack and rationing toilet paper.  But here's what he said in a reference to taking your lumps. "No institution ... (has) had the impact of this organization. We're going to rip and shred the federal government apart. And if you don't like it you can lump it." 

The "organization" to which Bannon was referring is the Center for Renewing America, one among a group of conservative advocacy groups that include past and future Trump officials. Mom never had as lofty a goal in using the phrase. It just meant "too bad." 

She has many saying, some of which I've covered here: 

"He (she) looks like a lonely petunia in an onion patch." 

"She looks like the wreck of the Hespures.'' (As when someone looks unkempt. The Hespures is the object of a poem by Longfellow about the dangerous hubris of a boat captain. I suppose he wasn't a good dresser either.)

"You have too many platters on your plate." (Once directed at me when I was overstressed.)

One of my "platters" is this blog, yet it's a good one. Because when I focus on my mother, I often get the emotional equivalent of a lump in my throat. 

But my teeth are still in my mouth.