By Dan Langford

Guides to, and commentaries on, speaking Southern get a lot of things wrong. It’s not because they portray our ways of talking as humorous or that they’re prone to exaggeration – we all need the ability to laugh at ourselves, and every good storyteller needs to shade things a bit every now and then to keep them interesting. Instead, these guides and commentaries are flawed in the following areas:
• They are always very general; as if Southerners from Richmond to north Florida, from coastal Carolina to inland Arkansas, sound exactly alike.
• They always seem to gravitate to the speech patterns of the lowest common denominator socially or educationally; and in doing so contribute to the hateful national impression that we are a backward people.
• There is no good way to express in writing the liquidity and cadence of a human voice. A Georgian and a Bostonian both may pronounce “car” as “cah,” but the Georgian will draw the word out over a couple or three seconds, almost making two syllables out of it; while the Bostonian will clip it off in a nanosecond. Capturing this lilt of voice on paper is impossible, which means that none of the guides and commentaries (this one included) can possibly get it exactly right.
• Compounding this difficulty is the process of phonetically spelling the way any of us says things – our usage may be perfectly grammatical, but spelling it as we say it makes it look automatically substandard.

I wouldn’t presume to write about Cajun, or Gullah, or Appalachian or any Southern manner of speech I may have heard only in passing. To do so would be almost as condescending as having a New Yorker discourse on the subject. What I can write about is a very narrow topic – standard English as is and has long been spoken by people of good background and breeding throughout much of Georgia’s piedmont, lower foothills and upper flatlands. If you are not a person of some refinement or education from this area of Georgia, do not know such a person, or are not possessed of some slight academic interest in the subject of how these Georgians speak, then honesty impels me to tell you this commentary is not for you.

One absolute exists in English usage everywhere; namely, that, while one may write beautifully standard and grammatically-correct English, one never speaks nearly so precisely. Local or regional dialect affects speech, and what sounds normal in one place may incorrectly sound substandard in another. Moreover, even one’s normal speech, reasonably precise as it may be, may lapse briefly into poor grammar, slang, or sentence construction so long as the lapse is intentional, is done for emphasis of a matter, and so long as the listener understands full-well the intentionality of such lapse. In other words, those who possess impeccable grammar are at blissful liberty to ignore it whenever they please.

Here’s an example, written as phonetically as I’m able to render it, of what I myself might say (in fact, have said) emphatically to a wayward teenager. “I’m fixin to take yo cah keys away, boy, an’ I ain’t gonna give ‘em back till you show me you’gn behave.” (The only ungrammatical utterance in the sentence is my use of “ain’t,” which my son knows I know better than to use formally, but which adds just the right emphasis to the stern message I’m conveying. The rest is just dialect – good, solid, raised-right usage in the part of the world where I’ve always lived.)

Look at the verb “fixing.” Most of us, in speaking, would drop the “g” and say “fixin,” as in “I’m fixin to carry Mama to get her hair done.” Allow no supercilious Yankee to tell you this usage is ungrammatical. Webster’s says “to fix” means to repair or to prepare. Thus, “I’m fixin the kitchen faucet” is a fine example of repairing, while “I’m fixin to go to the store” is an equally fine example of preparing. Even some Yankees fix supper (well…we’ll get to that in a minute), and they certainly aren’t repairing it when they do. Just don’t mix the usages in the same sentence. “I’m fixin to fix supper” is an abomination which points to a paucity of vocabulary.

Georgians don’t usually “take” people places, we “carry” them. Admittedly, that’s dialect; however, Webster lists it, so don’t laugh when we use “carry” to mean “convey.” We know perfectly well what we’re talking about, and messing with our dialect might cause our murderous tempers to flare. Georgia’s late Senator Herman Talmadge (1913-2002) was a master of communication. Once asked about a trash-talking opponent, the erudite Senator replied, “Waaaalllllllll, I knew his daddy. He, too, was a sumbitch.” In those few words, the Senator managed simultaneously to exhibit a keen comprehension of grammar, a putrid distaste for an adversary he deemed unworthy, and a dialect and delivery that would’ve been at home most anywhere in Georgia.

Yankees don’t really fix supper – they fix dinner. Dinner is the traditional Southern title for the midday meal, unless the viands happen to be light fare like Vienna sausages or sardines and soda crackers, all of which one may call “lunch.” The evening meal is “supper,” and for those of us of the Christian persuasion, the fact that supper was good enough for the sweet Lord Jesus Himself ought to make it good enough for us. “Soda crackers,” for the uninitiated, are called “Saltines” in other parts of the country. That somehow reminds me of “sweet milk,” which is what we used to call regular milk to differentiate it from buttermilk. Both are delicious, suitable for drinking alone or for crumbling hot cornbread into and eating with a spoon. Either one’s so good it’ll make you slap your grandma away from the table. (Don’t ask me why we say that – I suppose it’s to express extreme eagerness to get to something.) The late humorist Lewis Grizzard (1946-1994) wrote that his father, who was from Snellville, Georgia, often said, “Son, thez nothing in th’ world bettuh’n a good, cold glass of buttuhmilk. I’m convinced it’ll heal the sick and raise the dead.” I couldn’t agree more, and might just fix myself a glass directly.

If I’m not fixing to do something (which means “right now”), I might plan on doing it “directly,” which means “in a little while.” It’s old English and is pronounced something like “terrectly,” which, in fact, is how Atlanta’s Margaret Mitchell spelled it in Gone with the Wind. Atlanta, of course, is Georgia’s capital city, and today contains more Yankees than when General Sherman came through in 1864. Don’t listen to how the imports say “Atlanta” – listen to how the natives say it (which, by the way, is good advice no matter where one may go.) It’s something like “At-LAN-na.” No one from these parts pronounces the second “t,” and the jury is out as to whether the first syllable should be “At” or “Et.” It’s really too close to call. A metropolitan county, DeKalb, is pronounced “duh-CAB,” with no voice given the “l.” While the next two places are not in Georgia, they’re major Southern cultural centers, and we should all strive to pronounce them as their respective natives do. “Noo-WAUL-ins” and “CHOLL-ston” – New Orleans and Charleston, garden spots, both. You may have known that already, but an occasional refresher does us all good.

“Already.” Now there’s a word that can grate the Southern ear. Georgians of proper birth and breeding who have not outgrown their raising always — I repeat always — use “already” as an adverb (which you’ll remember from English class is nothing more than a sort of adjective for a verb) meaning prior to something. Some examples of this usage are “I already know that,” “I’ve already done that,” and “By Wednesday, they’ll already be gone.” You get the picture. What Southerners don’t do, not ever if they’re true to their native region, is use “already” as an intensive, as in “Enough, already,” “Shut up, already,” or “Get off my case, already.” We leave such Yankified talking to real Yankees. Such usage isn’t wrong per se, it’s just wrong for us. Who among Southerners wants to sound like a honker from New Jersey?

“Honker” doesn’t rate a high mark on a political correctness scale, probably, but we really don’t mean anything bad by it. It’s just that certain northern voices and accents from the upper Eastern states sound to us more like car horns than human voices. Car horns honk, so we sometimes call people who talk like this “honkers.” It’s just a saying, and Lord knows, we have plenty of those. A smattering of Southern sayings follows, together with a few purely Southern definitions:

• “Like a blind hog stumbling upon an acorn” – an expression and admission of pure luck
• “I’m going to see a man about a dog” – what I’m fixing to do is none of your damn business
• “Like putting perfume on a hog” – a useless attempt to improve something not improvable
• “Somebody better pick cotton” – quit talking and get busy doing something productive
• “I’m going to sell you to the Gypsies” – a light-hearted parental threat
• “Crank the car” – we realize automobile technology has advance beyond the Model T, but we’ve retained this phrase for the starting of our vehicles
• “Vaccinated with a victrola needle” – a light-hearted reference to someone who can’t stop talking
• “Full as a tick” – sated (unclear whether “tick” refers to an insect or a mattress)
• “Drunk as Cooter Brown” – heavily intoxicated (Cooter Brown, by the way, supposedly lived right on the Mason-Dixon Line at the time of the War Between the States. Eligible for draft by, and having family on, both sides of the conflict, he decided to stay drunk for the duration of the War to keep himself ineligible.)
• “Half-lit” – on the verge of intoxication
• “Poor as Job’s turkey” – completely impoverished (reference is from Old Testament Book of Job, naturally)
• “Pissing contest” – a useless argument in which hurtful and argumentative things are said
• “Don’t eat the seed corn” – admonition against living so lavishly that you dip into savings
• “Big for his britches” – aspersion for someone who has shown arrogance in his accomplishments or stated goals
• “Outgrown his raising” – similar to “big for his britches,” but has more to do with one who is ashamed of his background
• “Fourteen-carat son-of-a-bitch with spare parts” – a mean and nasty male
• “The Late Unpleasantness” – the War Between the States
• “The War” – the War Between the States
• “The War of Northern Aggression” – the War Between the States
• “The War Between the States” – our name for what folks from other parts of the country call “The Civil War”
• “Damnyankee” – a northerner who moves here who doesn’t have sense enough to know that we don’t care how things were done back home, or who is condescending toward us and our Southern ways
• “Dressing” – a mixture generally consisting of crumbled cornbread and biscuit, onion, celery seed, sage, and chicken or turkey broth which is baked in a pan (never inside a fowl), cut into squares, and served alongside the fowl, preferably with giblet gravy.
• “Stuffing” – something inside a pillow, cushion, mattress, beanbag, etc.
• “Soda” – white powder (sodium bicarbonate) often used in baking
• “Pop” – a nickname occasionally used in the South for a father or a grandfather
• “Soft drink” – a non-alcoholic beverage that is usually carbonated (the terms “coke” or “co-cola” are often used generically for such beverages, as well. People used to come into my grandaddy’s store and pull orange or grape co-colas out of the drink box.)
• “Sack” – something in which groceries are bagged at the supermarket
• “Get tickled” – begin laughing
• “Tempus sho’ do fugit” – a way of remarking upon the swift passage of time with levity

On that note I will concede that I have used a bunch of your “tempus,” and state my regret in having to “fugit” away soon. [And Yankees think we’re not an intellectual people! See how well we use Latin? A prayer borrowed from our mediæval British ancestors which has been said for nearly a century and a half in the South might be more convincing: A furore Normannorem libera nos, Domine! It means, “From the fury of the north men deliver us, O Lord!”]

Seriously though, educated Southern English as it is spoken through much of Georgia is a beautiful, lilting, melodious language. It’s as different from “redneck” English as British Cockney is from BBC English. The influences of television and northerners moving to our state have somewhat eroded its distinctiveness over the last generation, but it still manages to show a rather awesome resistance to change. People from other parts of the nation love to hear Southerners speak, and if we can all keep some humor about us, we can have a good time with our differences in speaking.

The late Congressman Robert Stephens (1913-2003) from Athens (who had grown up in Atlanta) was a good example of what I mean. A jolly little elf of a man with a brilliant mind and great personality, he served for many years in the U.S. House of Representatives. One day a House Committee upon which he served was interviewing a man named Moorhead. Congressman Stephens, in his upper-class drawl, kept referring to the witness as “Mistuh Mōhead.” A Midwestern congressman got tickled at this pronunciation, and posed a question intending to share his levity with the assembly: “Does the gentleman from Georgia not realize that the witness’s name, Moorhead, contains the letter ‘r’?”

In mock indignation, Congressman Stephens replied in his slowest, most deliberate tone, “Does the gennelmun from _____ think the gennelmun from Jawja a fool? Of cōse Ah reelize th’ name Mōhead contains an ‘ah’! If it didn, it’d be pronounced ‘Moo-head’, an’ yonduh witness sho’ dudn look lak a cow t’ me!” The room broke up.

May we glory in differences of the spoken word, and may any fun we poke at each other’s ways of speaking be just that — good-natured fun.

Dan Langford has not strayed far from his deep Georgia roots. He is the seventh generation of his family to live on the same farm in Brooks, Georgia, a town named for one of his ancestors. He is the author of the 2003 book History of Brooks, Georgia, and is co-owner and executive editor of 20 South Magazine.

By Clyde Jolly

Clyde Jolly, who grew up in the rural south in the 1920’s, passes along these Southernisms. We’d like to hear yours.

When my grandson said that a sweet little girl he knew was “tough,” I reprimanded him: certainly that well-behaved young woman was not “tough.” A little impatiently, he explained to me that “tough” meant “neat” or “nice.” Why didn’t he say “neat” or “nice,” then? I wondered. But if he could be transported back to the ‘Twenties and hear the Elizabethan expressions I was brought up on, he probably would be just as puzzled by them as am I by today’s talk.

For starters, my contemporaries and elders almost always added extra letters to personal pronouns. Especially to those showing possession, the letter “n” had to be added. Thus things owned were “his’n,” and “her’n,” “our’n,” “your’n” or “their’n.” They said “we’uns” and “you’uns.” or “their’n.” “It” became “hit” and “ain’t” - that grammatical corruption commonly used in English high society since the Victorian era - often came out as “hain’t.”

Many other words were distorted. Long i’s became low back a’s when followed by r’s, as in “I’m as tard as if I’d been arning all day before a hot far.” Even today it is not too difficult to find a set of “tars” for your car.

“Mout” served for “might,” “holp” for “help,” awrt” for “ought,” “stood” for stayed” (I should have stood in bed), “heered” for “heard,” “pert nigh” for “pretty near,” and “kindly” for “kind of.” Lots of folks had “years” instead of “ears.”

Not only did the settlers of the South bring with them words that had been used since Elizabethan times, but also each section seemed to come up with brand new words not found in the average dictionary. In certain sections of South Georgia, a person never threw an object - he “chunked” it. In my corner of the Appalachian foothills, a lad required his victim in a wrestling match to fight or say “calf rope” as an admission that he was giving up. The side batting in a baseball game was said to be “in holts.” When one teased a companion, he “guyed” him. A person completely tired was not “bushed,” as is now the case - he was “white-eyed.” A fellow embarrassed was “hacked.” An Atlanta newspaper columnist reminded me that the old-fashioned word for diaper was “hippen,” a word whose origin is not too difficult to guess. Oldsters did not address a letter, they “backed” it. “Mountain oysters” were the testicles of a pig, considered a delicacy by many. “Peart” was likely a corruption of “pert” - if a guy quicken his pace, he was said to “parten up.” A good country word still in use is “stob,” meaning a stake. And if you wanted a message delivered to someone, you didn’t ask the carrier to tell it to the receiver, you requested that he “name” it to him.
Similes and other comparisons have always been colorful in Appalachia. A man who was “as pore as Job’s turkey” and “as ugly as a mud fence” or as “ugly as home-made soap” was indeed in a bad way, although, if he was as “crazy as a bed bug, ” it probably didn’t matter. When he passed away, he could be as “dead as a door nail.” That was the ultimate - he couldn’t be deader.

Many sayings about food were in the lexicon of the countryman of the ’20s. When a guest had had enough to eat but was pressed to take another helping, it was proper for him to say, “Thank you, I’ve had a bait but it was powerful good.” The adverb “powerful” as used then was just what it said - “powerful.” When used with “good,” it almost became “goodest.”

Expressions denoting a sizable quantity such as “a good bit,” “a good deal,” and “right much” are probably universally used Americanisms, but when a noted Southern editor said on television that he had a “right smart” of a certain author’s work, he was repeating a colloquialism that rarely appears in print, but is still often heard in conversations all over the rural South.

Ask a country character of the ’20s how he felt, and he might well say, “I feel tol’able” - short for “I feel tolerably well” - or “I’m feelin’ good as common” or “fair to middlin’.” The weather was the subject of several pat expressions. If “it was coming up a cloud,” it didn’t mean just any old cloud. It meant a thunderstorm was brewing. When the oldsters said, “Looks like we’re going to have some weather,” they meant stormy weather. And when rain streaks were seen against the sun on late afternoons, someone was sure to remark that “The sun’s drawing water.”

The sayings of rural Appalachia go on and on. Northerners “make” dinner; city folks in the South “cook” it; but out here in the boondocks we “fix” it. When we “put on the dog, ” one way of doing it would be “dressing fit to kill.” We often substitute “bad” for “prone” or “likes to” - for instance, “he’s bad to drink” or “bad to gamble.” We might even say “he’s bad to have a good time.” The height of laziness is expressed by the man who “wouldn’t hit a lick at a snake with it strikin’ him.” Expressions of astonishment started with the well known. ” Well, I declare,” or “I do declare,” and then wandered into strange and wonderful sayings like “That takes the rag right off the bush.” The last saying may have originated when a thief took all the cloths, including the rags, off a bush where a pioneer woman had spread them out to dry.

One of the areas where Americans all over show originality is in their pet by-words, swear words, or exclamations. The most unusual one I ever heard belonged to old man Will Caldwell, who let the air out of his tires every Sunday morning and them pumped them up again. He said it made the tires last longer. Mr. Will’s constant and favorite by-word, used on every occasion, was “Thus, poodlejack.”

“Thus, poodlejack,” in my considered opinion, takes the rag right off the bush.

By Wilson Hall
Wilson met Ernest Brocket while researching a fishing story on Lake Seminole in the southwest corner of Georgia.

When I first met Ernest Brockett he was sitting in the reclining chair of the bait shop at Jack Wingate’s Lunker Lodge on Lake Seminole. He was over 75 years old, but his step was lively and his eyes were clear, giving a good indication of the quickness of mind within the man. When he was not fishing or hunting or working his garden or training his dog, he was at Wingate’s talking to people in the shop or out on the front porch. And at the first sign of interest, he would tell you about deer hunting, turkey calling, dog training or bass fishing. Then to all of this, he would add his philosophy of life.

There was a group of people standing around Ernest talking. Jack stopped me at the counter and asked me if I knew Ernest.
“No,” I said, “Who is he?”
“Go over and meet him,” Jack said. “We call him the ‘Sage of Seminole.’ ”
So I went over and introduced myself.
“I guess you have lived around here for a long time,” I said by way of breaking the ice.
“Might say I have,” Ernest said, showing me a circle of his thumb and index finger. “When I first came here the moon wasn’t but this big and there wasn’t no stars.
“Times have sure changed, ” he said. “When I was younger there wasn’t a body of water in this area that I couldn’t jump over in one jump. Now I catch bass where I used to hunt deer and turkey.”
“That was over twenty years ago, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“More or less,” Ernest said. “Are you a writer?”
“Yes,” I said. “I write for Brown’s Guide.”
“Do you write about hunting?”
“No,” I said, “I write about fishing.”
“Never mind that,” Ernest said. “I have got some information I want to pass on to the world. I want you to put it in your magazine.”
“Well, I can’t promise you that,” I said.
“I want to tell all the world how to call a deer,” he said. “This information is worth a million dollars to people who want to know it.”
“Call a deer!” I said. Then I thought: Here you are, about to have your leg pulled. Your have been around fishing and hunting camps long enough to see it coming. I did not know whether to laugh him off or carry the thing along to learn what the end would be.
“Okay,” I said, “How do you call a deer?”
“With these,” Ernest said and held out his brown bony fingers.
“How does it work?” I asked, bracing myself to become the butt of the joke.
“You have to be wearing khaki or denim pants,” he said. “And what you do is take your four fingers and thumb and get a good grasp on the muscle on the back of your leg. Then you drag your fingernails over the cloth in a quick crisp ‘crunch’ of a sound. This sounds like a deer chewing acorns. A deer’s hearing is 40 times better than a man’s. If a deer hears that sound on a still morning, he will come to where he thinks other deer are eating acorns.”
There is the end of the ride, I thought. Is my leg pulled or not?
I looked at Ernest in the eyes for a few moments, not saying anything. Ernest looked back at me, eye-to-eye. “Put that in your magazine and people will thank you for it,” he said.
Later that day, I asked one of the guides what he thought about Ernest’s “deer call.”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know, because I never tried it. But last year Earnest killed a deer so close with his shotgun that they dug the wading out with the shot. He’s getting too old and doesn’t see as well as he used to, so he has to get them in close to get a good shot, and he shoots his deer every year.
Later Ernest told me: “I’ve tried to live my life by one principle: I always try to help the other fellow when he is in need. When I learn that someone needs help, I pray to God that I will be able to help them. I have plowed fields, dug ditches, helped build houses, given money. And I have had it returned to me. People don’t seem to feel that way about each other any more, not as much as they used to. But it is a good way to live. Can you imagine what kind of world it would be if everyone tried to help his neighbor? It would be hard for people to dispute.”

Well, world, here is the million dollars worth of information that Ernest wanted you to have. Use it in good health.

Dr. John Burrison, professor of English at Georgia State University, estimates there are dozens of stories involving preachers and chicken, but he selected the best of the bunch for his book Storytellers: Folktales & Legends from the South. This story was told by Don Buchanan of Decatur, who heard it from his father, a Baptist minister:

Once there was this preacher who loved fried chicken, as all preachers are supposed to love fried chicken. And he was invited to eat at the house of one of his parishioners one Sunday. After church he made his way through the country to this house, and it so happened, as he was crossing this particular creek, right in the middle of the bridge he stumbled and he lost his false teeth, and they fell in the creek.

Well, ‘course he couldn’t eat, but he couldn’t turn down this invitation either, so he went on to the house. And, as they ate dinner, he ate what he could eat—mash potatoes an’ things that weren’t so hard to chew—but he didn’t touch the fried chicken. Well, he had a great reputation for eating fried chicken, and so, of course, everybody at the table was amazed and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t eating any fried chicken. So finally they asked him. And he said, “Well, I just have to tell you the truth. I lost my teeth goin’ across the creek down here, an’ I just can’t eat any.”

Well, he no sooner got the words out of his mouth than a little boy ‘bout twelve years old jumped up from the table, grabbed a chicken leg from off the platter, got him a piece of string, and went out the door.

‘Bout half an hour later he came back in, and he had the teeth in his hand. An’ the preacher said, “How in the world did you get those teeth out of the creek?”

He said, “Well, I just took this chicken leg and tied the string on it and dipped it down in the water, and those teeth bit right on it!”

John Burrison’s academic interest in folklore evolved during his undergraduate years at Pennsylvania State University, where he published and edited Folkways magazine. He came to Georgia State University in 1966 to develop the folklore curriculum in the Department of English, where he teaches such courses as American Folklore, Georgia Folklife, British Folk Culture, and Irish Folk Culture. He serves as curator of the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia at Sautee Nacoochee Center near Helen.