"I mean stony."

That's a line from page 71 of On Writing. The whole paragraph reads:

Trudging from the car to our apartment building on that summer afternoon was a low point. I was carrying Naomi and a tote-bag full of baby survival equipment (bottles, lotions, diapers, sleep suits, undershirts, socks) while Tabby carried Joe, who had spit up on her. She was dragging a sack of dirty diapers behind her. We both knew Naomi needed THE PINK STUFF, which was what we called liquid amoxicillin. THE PINK STUFF was expensive, and we were broke. I mean stony.

There's a lot to love about this passage. I identify with it because, as a parent of young children, I also refer to amoxicillin as "the pink stuff." I also love the style of the parenthetical list, which has no final "and" (that's called asyndeton, if you need to know). But the last sentence really gets me. The term stony is not something I'd heard before as a reference to poverty; though Webster's says it's British slang for "stone broke," I feel pretty sure that it's authentic King, which means Maine, which connects different localities in a common slang. There's a lot to learn from passages like this about what King will later discuss as being honest, being truthful with language. It rings like that.