By DAN LANGFORD

My Webster’s says this word is of unknown origin, but it reeks of Southernness to me.  It means good shrewd common sense and get-up-and-go, and it’s the word generations of Southern mamas used to teach their children what separated the survivors from those who lost everything in the wake of the War Between the States and Reconstruction.

In more modern times, it’s been used to spur kids on, to give them ambition, to get them going on a task they dread or fear. ”Have some gumption and get to it!”  It’s also been used in admiring terms in discussing the attributes of a person who’s endured a tough experience or series thereof.  “Helen really has a lot of gumption to have gone through all she has had to deal with and come out smiling like she did.”

Both men and women used the word, which was perfectly acceptable for utterance in polite society.  A less elegant variation, usually employed by the menfolks when the ladies weren’t around to object, was “piss and vinegar.”  Both are great terms one seldoms hears anymore.  That’s a shame.  I hope we haven’t lost our gumption and simply don’t recognize it any longer.

By DAN LANGFORD

One used to hear this phrase a lot in the church-going South.  “My mother-in-law was raising Cain with us about….”  The more obvious phrase would be “raising hell,” which one heard quite often, too; but “raising Cain” was used in more polite circles.  You could tell your mama or your Sunday School teacher that someone was “raising Cain,”  while saying they were ”raising hell” was liable to get one slapped.

There was a country song some twenty-five or so years ago in which the artist said that he himself was the only hell his mama had ever raised.  That always struck me as a funny play on words, but it plays right into the phrase under discussion today, “raising Cain.”  What does it mean?

Quite simply, in the book of Genesis, we read that Adam and Eve begot Cain and Abel.  When the two boys got about grown, the story tells us that Cain killed his brother, becoming the world’s first murderer.  Whether one takes the creation account in Genesis as literal truth or as metaphor is beside the point — what’s important to walk away with is that the parents of Cain sowed the proverbial whirlwind — they raised a major trouble-maker right in their own house.  Thus, someone who was ”raising Cain” was stirring up trouble, perhaps more than they realized.

I don’t know what’s happened to this old phrase.  Don’t know when I’ve heard it said in recent years, but it’s a colorful piece of Southern speech that ought to be saved.

By DAN LANGFORD

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.

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.

By DAN LANGFORD

Blind hogs and acorns.  It’s a colorful old Southern expression, from the day when most Southerners were involved in agriculture, which expresses that something that is pure luck.

My daddy used the phrase to diminish encomia heaped upon him for astute business decisions — “It wasn’t particularly prescient on my part.  It was more like an old, blind hog stumbling upon an acorn.”

I assume it’s a Southern phrase — I can’t imagine a Northerner saying it.  I can apply the phrase to my pleasure in being chosen to write this blog for Brown’s Guide to Georgia, and I must say I appreciate those who read and respond to the assorted nonsense this old blind hog comes up with.   Hopefully there’s an acorn or two of truth — or reminiscence — or levity, at least occasionally.

By DAN LANGFORD

After my exchange last week with the convenience store clerk over the word “sack,” I’m tempted to go back in and ask her if she has any sweet milk or light bread.  The first of those delectables we’ve covered in a previous entry, but “light bread” is simply pre-sliced, enriched white loaf bread — Colonial, Sunbeam, Wonder, Merita, to dredge up some names from the past and present.

I don’t know why it’s called “light bread,” but I’ve heard that everywhere in Georgia I’ve ever lived, so I think it’s fairly common usage.   As an aside, I happen to prefer to eat hamburgers and barbeque sandwiches on light bread than on buns, which probably isn’t so common.

I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who can tell me why it’s called “light bread.”  Until I do, I’ll persist in calling it that, and in eating it with my barbeque and hamburgers.

By DAN LANGFORD

I bought three or four small things in a convenience store the other day, and the preoccupied clerk offered me nothing in which to carry them out.  “May I have a sack, please?” I asked politely.

“A WHAT??!!” came her sarcastic and not-at-all friendly reply.

” A sack,” I repeated, feeling a bit awkward and conspicuous, but unsure as to why.

The clerk, who as far as I could tell was not foreign, had never heard a “bag” referred to as a “sack,” which made me wonder if the latter is a Southern thing.  “I thought a sack was something you got into each night — like hitting the sack,” she told me.

“I’ve heard that and said it,” I told her, “but mostly a ’sack’ is what we bring groceries home from the store in.  She seemed unconvinced, which I might understand if I had asked for a “poke,” usage I’ll admit is old-fashioned and quaint — but not to know what a “sack” is?  I’m continually amazed.

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.