This Thanksgiving week, it’s important to note that no Southerner with any pride of place would deign to eat something called “stuffing,” unless of course he or she happens to be visiting Yankees for Thanksgiving.  In that case, it’s far better to be polite and eat what’s set before you, even if it has been pulled straight out of a turkey’s butt, than to insist on dressing the way the Good Lord intended it to be made. 

“Stuffing,” for the uninitiated, is what goes into upholstered furniture.  “Dressing,”  on the other hand, is a Southern dish, made in many various ways, but always baked in a pan and cut into squares for serving with giblet gravy at a holiday table. 

The most common ingredients are similar amounts of cooked cornbread and biscuit (though many fine and upstanding folks use white loaf bread in place of the biscuit), to which are added liberal amounts of sage, onion, celery or celery seed, juices from a just-cooked turkey or hen, and usually an egg or two and a touch of sweetmilk.  It’s so good it might make you slap your grandma away from the table, but doing so would put a damper on the Thanksgiving festivities, so we’ll all just have to restrain ourselves.  (I’ll be happy to pass along a time-honored family recipe for dressing to anyone who might be interested.)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!  Enjoy your dressing, turkey, all the other wonderful table offerings; but most of all, be safe and celebrate the time with your families.  God bless!

Wouldn, couldn, and shouldn are common Southern pronunciations for the contractions wouldn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t.  “Wouldn” rhymes with “wooden,” as do “couldn” and “shouldn.”  Most of us, when relaxing in the language, feel no need to pronounce the terminal “t’s.”  Naturally, we’d write them correctly, but why go to the effort of saying it so precisely?

 We probably shouldn drop letters like that, and wouldn if it made a bit of difference.  It dudn (there’s another one - for “doesn’t”), so what’s the harm?  I couldn care less, could you?

Eating breakfast out with my wife and boys the other Saturday, the young waitress began by taking our drink orders.  The fellows ordered orange juice, my wife ordered coffee with cream, and I ordered my usual breakfast beverage — sweet milk, which I pour myself at home and seldom need to say aloud. The waitress looked puzzled, and asked if I wanted condensed milk.  “No, ma’am,” I told her.  “Just plain old sweet milk — plain milk, if you will — skim, if you have it.”  My boys were hiding under the table by this point, I was embarrassing them so badly; and my country-bred wife reminded me gently after the waitress taken our order in that nobody younger than about forty has any idea what sweet milk is.

That’s a shame.  In the South, buttermilk is (or at least used to be) considered a delicacy.  The late humorist, Lewis Grizzard, reported that his father said he was convinced a good glass of buttermilk would heal the sick and raise the dead.  I agree completely.  My wife likes to eat cornbread in buttermilk (I prefer sweetmilk for that particular pleasure myself), but our kids can’t stand the stuff.  I suspect  most younger folks can’t, which explains why “sweet milk” is no longer in the lexicon.  That term was used to differentiate plain old milk from buttermilk in a day when every Southern refrigerator (or “icebox,” as folks of my grandmother’s generation called their Fridigaires) held a container of both.

Drinking buttermilk has gone the way of the Edsel, and with it, the need for the good old Southern term “sweet milk.”   I guess that’s life, but I’m going to continue to say it, if for no other reason than to fulfill my duty as a parent to embarrass my teenagers.

Similar to “I swannee” is “I declare,” a statement of  surprise and/or emphsis one once heard quite often in the South.  It’s a useful phrase, capable of covering all the territory from “my goodness” to “I’ll be damned.”  Usually, it meant a nice surprise, more in line with “my goodness” than the other extreme. The late Floy Farr, father of Peachtree City, said it to me when we met for the first time in more than twenty years, some ten or twelve years ago.  “Well, I declare, Dan; you’ve grown up since I saw you last.” 

It’s a phrase that’s not much heard anymore, which I think is a shame.  A lot of our quaint Southern sayings are becoming scarce as hen’s teeth.  I declare, that’s a trend I don’t much care for.