By DAN LANGFORD

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.

By DAN LANGFORD

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.

By DAN LANGFORD

This is a phrase I’ve heard all my life to describe abject poverty.  It’s obviously of Biblical origin, for the travails of Job have been told for millenia.

I suppose it took a farmer familiar with fowl to coin the phrase, though; for with all the hardship poor Job endured, his livestock must have had it infinitely worse.  Anybody’s turkey scratches around trying to find food, and Job’s must have had an exceptionally difficult time in staying fed.  That, I suppose, is where the phrase comes from, and if the present (January 2009) distressed economy continues, God forbid, we may all be poor as Job’s turkey.  Let’s hope we don’t experience the phrase first-hand.