By DAN LANGFORD

That’s Latin for “Dog Days,” the lethargic time of mid-August which in Georgia is usually so hot and muggy one can’t stand it, a time when plants stop growing and focus on simple survival in the oppressive heat, and during which old folks said superstitious powers were at work, causing such strange things to happen as a cut not healing until Dog Days were over.  Sounds like a curious or maybe even peculiar Southern tradition, doesn’t it?

Guess what?  It ain’t.  The ancient Greeks had Dog Days, as did the ancient Romans, whose name for the period is set forth in today’s post title.  I was in such a state of surprise after reading that on Wikipedia that someone could have run me off the steep side of Stone Mountain with a corn cob and a chicken feather.  Dog Days not uniquely Southern?  An impression shattered!

Guess we Southerners can’t take credit for all the world’s eccentricities, as much as we might like to.  But I’ll just betcha Dog Days on the Acropolis or in the Coliseum don’t feel anything like as oppressive as they do here.

We’re in the middle of Dog Days, folks (or about to get to them, one — it’d take someone far better versed in signs than I to know for sure), so make sure the A/C is in good order and be especially careful with knives.

By DAN LANGFORD

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.

By DAN LANGFORD

Eating greens and peas on New Year’s Day is a Southern tradition many believe stretches back to the time of the Civil War.  After the Yankees invaded Georgia, very little was left in the way of foodstuffs.  My own grandmother, alive and well at 89, remembers her grandmother (who witnessed a well-documented skirmish of the Battle of Atlanta in her front yard at age 9, and who died at 81 in 1936) saying her family subsisted on turnip and collard greens, sweet potatoes, and dried apples, and peas for the better part of a year after Sherman’s scorch.  A lot of Southern families have similar memories, and that is why one is still hard-pressed to find even a single bunch of collard or turnip greens in metro-Atlanta groceries at the last minute on New Years Day.  Better buy ‘em early, because eating greens and peas on New Years is a way of life for us.  We are a people of long memory and tradition, and our New Year’s fare is a big part of that.

A pone of cornbread is the bread of choice for one’s New Year’s meal — cook whatever meat you want (I prefer pork roast, personally) to accompany the veggies, but eating greens and peas without good buttermilk and bacon-grease cornbread is almost sinful.

Happy New Year to all, and start it off the right way — with greens, peas, and cornbread.

By DAN LANGFORD

Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Or Happy Hanukkah!

Or Karmic Kwanzaa!

Or whatever your pleasure!  Just be safe and be happy.  Talking Southern will return on Monday, Dec. 29th.

By DAN LANGFORD

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!

By DAN LANGFORD

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.

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: (more…)