I’m not sure how to spell this word, and am open for alternative suggestions.  For those who don’t know, it’s the common Southern vernacular pronunciation for the word “children.”

I suppose it’s the way some Southerners actually say the word, though in my experience, it was more often used as a term of affection.  Mama, a precise-speaking English major and high school English teacher before motherhood, would say it when addressing her children in masse, in a variety of circumstances.  “Chillun,” she might say in a light and fun moment, ”how’d y’all like to make a churn of ice cream?”   In an ordinary, hum-drum comment, she might say, “Chillun, jump in the station wagon.  It’s time for piano lessons.”  On occasions when our behavior was taxing her patience, she might say, “Chillun, I’m'o sell y’all to the gypsies if you don’t behave.”

Mama obviously knew (and knows) that the word is both spelled and pronounced “children,” but reverting into “chillun” as a term of affection and endearment has long been an accepted way of relaxing in the language.  And that’s what Southerners do best — relax in the language.  

It’s funny how a comment in passing has the ability to conjure up a veritable photo album of memories.  It happened to me the last week in one of several unglamorous roles I fulfill, that of zoning administrator for the Town of Brooks.  A newcomer who has lived here only 30 years or so was asking about his tract of land, and in order to remind me where it is physically located, said “It’s what the old-timers called the ‘Gypsy Woods’.”

Indeed they did.  My grandmother, who was born in Brooks in 1905, remembered gypsies coming through every year in her youth, and would identify the particular copse the above-mentioned man owns any time we’d ride by as the “Gypsy Woods,”  saying that’s where the exotic foreigners always camped when they came to Brooks to trade.  I’ve never seen a gypsy to my knowledge, but have long had a picture in my mind of what their caravans and members must have looked like in those days of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The more immediate memory last week’s encounter brought back for me was that of the light-hearted parental threat I heard time and time again in my youth — a threat whose roots sprang from the mysterious and flashy visitors who had once come to our village annually: “Boy, if you don’t behave, I’m'o sell you t’th’gypsies.”  It basically means “straighten up and fly right,”  “mind your P’s and Q’s,” “I’m gonna jerk a knot in your tail if you keep on in that vein,” or something similar.  When I heard I was about to be sold to the gypsies, it was usually enough to cause an immediate attitude adjustment, for it was a parental warning shot over the bow, so to speak; a preamble to relatively severe consequences to come if behaviors weren’t rather immediately modified.

I suspect it’s distinctly Southern, and would be quite surprised if the phrase were confined to Brooks.  I would be interested to hear whether others have encountered this expression.

That’s not a derisive term, really; it’s just one I used to hear from my grandparents’ generation to differentiate their holidays.  As I mentioned in a previous posting, Confederate Memorial Day is observed each year on the twenty-sixth of April.  In the South of the first half of the 1900s, that was called “Memorial Day.” 

The national holiday in May was originally called “Decoration Day.” The substitute “Memorial Day” began to be widely used after World War II, so a device was needed to differentiate.  “Yankee Memorial Day” is the term many folks used to accomplish that differentiation.

I had thought it an old Brooks term till twenty-something years ago, when my wife and I, as newlyweds living in Athens, Georgia, invited a dear old widow to eat supper at our house on the last Monday in May.  A member of the local gentry whose grandfather had been president of the State Normal School,  she was refinement and gentility personified.  Her thank-you note, written in a flowing Lucy Cobb Institute hand,  mentioned that our get-together was such a nice way for Southern friends to celebrate Yankee Memorial Day.

Whatever you want to call it, have a happy one; but do pause to remember why we commemorate this day.  Remember those brave men and women over time who have given up their tomorrows to ensure the freedom of our own.

My late father was a stickler about lawn maintenance, averring that nice folks kept nice yards.  His always looked like a golf course, and he’d comment scathingly about folks who allowed their yards to become unkempt.

I was reminded of one of his expressions the other day when I went to mow my maternal grandmother’s yard.  My uncle (her son) and I share that duty now that the house is vacant and she’s in a nursing home, and to say that it’s near the top of either of our priority lists would be an overstatement.  Thus, when I got to her house, I discovered that her grass was, as my dad would have said, nearly axle-deep to a ferris wheel.

I think that’s an expression of my late father’s own invention, but he was Southern, it’s descriptive, and seems to fit here.   With all the rain we’ve been having lately, be sure your yard doesn’t get in the same fix.

Anybody out there have any idea where this phrase comes from?  It certainly sounds Southern, but I have no proof of its origin.  Under the assumption that it is a Southern phrase, though (and I feel half-way confident assuming this because I can’t imagine anyone from New Jersey using the phrase); I’d like to make it my topic for the week.

“I’ve known him since he was knee-high to a grasshopper.” 

“I haven’t seen one of those since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.” 

Such are the types of sentences in which one hears this colorful old phrase.  Sometimes I have heard “hoppergrass” used instead of “grasshopper,” but in my part of the world such usage is generally reserved for  folks with little standing in their communities. 

Taken in the context of those illustrative sentences (and in any other context in which you’d be apt to hear the phrase), it rather obviously means “since I (or someone else) was quite young.”  A grasshopper’s knees are pretty low, and the phrase is just a colorful way of expressing the time when the subject of the conversation was basically a babe-in-arms.

That image brings me around to this coming Sunday, which is Mothers’ Day, for the arms most babes are in belong to their mothers.   Our mothers carried us before we were knee-high to a grasshopper, tended us long after we grew in grace and stature, and loved us even when we were at our most unlovely.   They eased our anxieties, bandaged our wounds, cheered our victories, and wiped our tears.  Let’s not just honor them on Sunday, but every day; for they’ve put up with us since we were born — before we were born — and if anyone has known us since we were knee-high to a grasshopper, it’s our moms.

 Happy Mother’s Day.

I’ve truly struggled over whether to write this post or not.  In doing so, I’ve frankly let the moment pass, for Confederate Memorial Day (hereafter “CMD”) slipped quietly by most everyone last Sunday.  

One reason for my hesitancy is that today’s topic has nothing to do with Southern speech, which is the main thrust of this blog.  On the other hand, if we’re talking about Southern things and events, CMD is an important topic. As one who is interested in history of all stripes, and as a Southerner proud of his heritage, I want to remember it; but do not wish to be mistaken as a Stars-and-Bars-waving unreconstructed Rebel.  My dislike for expression-stifling “political correctness” trumps my hesitancy, however; so here goes.

CMD was institued after the Civil War to honor those who served the Confederacy.  April 26th was chosen as the observance date because it was the  date in 1865 on which Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrendered (in North Carolina) to Federal general W. T. “Fireball” Sherman after the last major Confederate offensive.  This was more than two weeks after General Lee’s surrender to General Grant at Appomattox. 

CMD was once a huge holiday in the South — in fact, when I was growing up, we simply called it “Memorial Day,” as differentiated from “Yankee Memorial Day,” which the nation celebrates in late May.  An aside that illustrates this point is that one of the most tragic chapters of Atlanta history occurred because a pretty teenager, Mary Phagan, went downtown on April 26th, 1913, to pick up her pencil-factory pay, and afterward to watch the huge CMD parade in Atlanta.  Poor Mary never saw the parade.  Her murder, the resultant sensational trial and subsequent lynching of suspect Leo Frank all remain a blot on Georgia’s history.

 How do we deal with CMD in this enlightened year of 2009?  We seem to have tossed it on the ash-heap of history, and many would argue that that’s where it belongs. 

I’ve struggled with my own stance on the subject for years.   I was a city councilman for a decade, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (hereafter, the “SCV”) came several years running to ask the council to proclaim April 26th as Confederate Memorial Day in our village.  I never voted for that, under the logic that April 26th is already a state holiday, and that for the Town of Brooks to proclaim CMD in our city would be redundant.  We don’t proclaim Christmas a holiday, nor July the 4th; so why, I reasoned, should we proclaim CMD as a holiday?  I never voted for it; however, when the SCV changed its tack a few years later and asked us to sign on with all other cities in our county as proclaiming April “Confederate History and Heritage Month”  in Fayette County,  I had no trouble voting for that as it didn’t duplicate an already-legal holiday.  (Our local SCV, by the way, is composed of many fine gentlemen who are my friends.  I am eligible on many counts to join their organization, but have always chosen not to do so.)

I am blessed in being able to walk from my house to the old cemetery in Brooks, and see where my three-greats grandfather, a Confederate soldier in an infantry unit called the “Fayette Planters” who died of measles at Fredericksburg, is NOT buried.   His widow’s grave stands alone there — there was no money to bring his body back home in December 1862.  On CMD that’s usually what I do – walk over and stand at his widow’s grave for a moment and reflect.  Then I may drive the very short distances to other local cemeteries where other of my Confederate-serving forebears ARE buried.  It takes thirty minutes at most to do this, and it is sufficient for me.

I guess what I’m trying to say in this probably incoherent ramble is this:  celebrate CMD, or don’t celebrate it; whichever option suits you best.  To those who would choose to celebrate CMD, please refrain from having a raucous celebration. There are two principal reasons for this:  a)  the holiday has always been intended as a quiet time of reflection, and b) being loud and obnoxious about your CMD celebration frankly chaps most everybody else, from those who hate the holiday to those who choose to celebrate it quietly, briefly, and reverently, as I do.  To those who whould just as soon forget CMD and rejoice at seeing it mostly ignored in this day and time, I think your point of view is winning, and maybe that’s as it should be.  Please realize, though, that most of us who continue to remember CMD and to hold it in some degree of reverence are just harmlessly eccentric antiquarians, not firebrands ready to lead another secession, nor racists wanting to turn back the civil rights calendar.

On this Monday after torrential rains and flooding in much of the country, it seems appropriate to trot out this old gem of presumably Southern origin.  I say “presumably” because I’ve no idea where the saying comes from, but can you imagine anyone from New York, New Jersey, or Chicago saying it?  I can’t.  The phrase is generally used to emphasize an affirmative answer to a pressing question, as in “Can you be here first thing Monday morning?”  One might reply, “I’ll be right here, th’Good Lord willin’ an’ th’creek don’t rise.”  The phrase has its other uses, too; most of which in my experience have been appended to discussions of fairly grand plans, as in “Inez an’ me are goin’ t’Itly next month, th’Good Lord willin’ an’ th’creek don’t rise.”

It’s possible that “Creek,” not “creek,” was intended when the phrase first originated.  Creek Indian uprisings were certainly a factor in my part of Georgia (I actually live on Chief McIntosh’s trail), what with McIntosh’s White Stick Creeks of Georgia at increasing odds with their Red Stick Creek counterparts across the way in Alabama in the 1810s and 1820s.  Who really knows?

Uprisings of Creeks are no longer a threat, but as we’ve seen this past week, upswells of creeks are as dangerous as ever.  I have an idea the funny old saying will last as long as creeks keep rising,  but certainly no longer than the Good Lord is willing.  In the mean time, keep your feet dry.

Have been hibernating like a bear for the last several weeks, but the pretty weather this past weekend caused me to stir from my den, stretch, and begin to get active again.  Noticed Friday’s calendar heading, and saw that date marked the vernal equinox, or, what most call the beginning of Spring.  Only in most places in Georgia, it’s pronounced “Sprang,” both as to the season, the noun, and the predicate.  Conjugating the verb “to spring” was always interesting in the Georgia classrooms of my youth.  Spring, sprang, (have) sprung — except everyone always pronounced it “Sprang, sprang, (have) sprung.”

Flowers have sprung forth from the ground, buds are springing from the trees, sneezes are springing from noses due to the annual pollen coating on everything — a sure sign that “Sprang” is upon us.  Enjoy the beauty of the season!

Even worse than last week’s topic of common and tacky was, and is, ’sorry.’  I’m not talking about ’sorry’ as it’s used when making apology or feeling remorse.  All of us probably need more of that, and that’s not the usage of which I speak.

“He’s just sorry as gulley dirt,” I can hear my folks saying about a particularly disreputable character in our hometown whose actions and appearance went way past common and tacky.   Common and tacky can be redeemed, probably.  I’m not so sure about sorry, for I was raised to think its almost genetic.

That doesn’t mean my parents and others didn’t warn us against being sorry.  “Son, only sorry folks do (or don’t do, as the case might have been) that,” I can hear both my parents saying.  “That’s just plain sorry.”  We learned it early and we learned it well, and I’ll bet there’s not a Southerner on the face of the earth who doesn’t know what it means.

Southern ladies used these words, and may still, in bringing up their children.  “That’s tacky,” I can hear my mama saying across the years.  “Don’t be common.”  “Tacky’ is easy enough to understand, but ‘common’ can be confusing.  In warning us against being ‘common,’ she didn’t mean ‘ordinary,’ though ordinary was never the level she and Daddy taught us to seek.  By ’common,’ she meant she meant ‘plebian, unwashed, unmannered,’ and definitely not ‘raised right.’

Something exceptionally common caused her to use blistering phraseology — “common as pig tracks.”  When Mama said that, you could hear the disdain in her voice, and could bet she thought the folks in question were of dubious quality – were folks she didn’t want to have a thing to do with, even distant family.  “Those folks are common as pig tracks,” she would say about the harum-scarum bunch one of her mother’s first cousins had married into.  “They’re not my kinfolks — I gave ‘em away.”

While I can’t say the following with complete authority, I would venture to guess that any native middle-Georgian of a certain age who has never heard his mama or grandma caution against being common and tacky…just may be.