Thursday, September 21, 2006
Regionalisms
Sorry for my prolonged absence from here. I just keep getting busy and not getting back to doing things I enjoy, like writing my blog. Thanks for not giving up on me.
I was on another website recently where folks were talking about southern expressions, and I have seen a lot of pass-it-on emails about how to talk southern, a phenomenon which came into vogue when Jimmy Carter was elected President in the 70s, and which Jeff Foxworthy has raised to an art form all its own. I guess every region has expressions indigenous to their area, but thanks to television, the language is becoming almost homogeneous and regionalisms are disappearing. So many of them will go away as the Depression/WWII generation leaves us, and my generation (the baby boomers) are called “Cosmic Possums” because we’ll be the last generation (as a whole) to remember some of these expressions and know what they mean, even as we cease using them.
I was born in Texas, raised in Tennessee, have roots in Virginia so deep they come out in Asia, never lived north of Washington, DC, and have lived in Georgia for 17 years, so I am definitely southern. I always crack up when I hear southerners (usually women) who “swan” or “swannee”. I assume this was originated as a genteel form of saying, “Well, I swear”, when, fiddledeedee, evahbody knows we southern flowers are much too delicate to out-and-out swear (yeah, right!), and maybe “I do declare” wasn’t emphatic enough for the occasion. Sometimes I even heard “I swan to goodness”, which I guess was like swearing to the Almighty. My ex-mother-in-law (God rest her AKC-registered soul) used to swan and swannee with the best of them, and I always wished she would be honest enough to come out and swear, just once, instead of hiding behind water birds. She was so pretentious that she had a plaque in her house that said “something something something well, something something something hell” (sorry – I can’t remember exactly what it said), and someone (I feel sure it was her) marked out the word “hell” and wrote in “heck”. To me that was the most absurd thing – if you find it that offensive, just don’t have it in your house in the first place. Anyway, I digress. I don’t hear people swan or swannee much any more, but I still hate it, mainly because of her and because it sounds rather pretentious, if not outright ridiculous. I never could figure out how to conjugate the verb “to swan”. (Would the past participle be “have swun”?)
My sister pointed out the absurdity of my asking for a chocolate Coke when I was 10. At the time, I thought I was the only one who did it, and later realized what a southern thang it is. I also used to hear “pop” and “dope” for a soft drink before “dope” meant another kind of coke. Of course, every southerner knows that the proper pronunciation of Coke is “Co-Cola”.
My grandmothers used to say “directly” when they meant “soon” or an indeterminate time in the future, but they pronounced it “dreckly”, and for years I thought they were two different words. One of my former bosses, who couldn’t spell his own name to save his life and wouldn’t know correct grammar if it had bitten him on his hindquarters, used to tell me that the southern pronunciation wasn’t “dreckly”, it was “toreckly”. He kept on until I told him I was not going to argue with him about the proper MISpronunciation of a word.
My grandfather had a book of song lyrics he wrote down so he would be able to sing along, and they are not songs he wrote – just songs that were popular when he was a teenager. One of them is called “Holading”, and from the gist of the lyrics, I can only guess that “holadin’” was a term in the late 1800s/early 1900s for “courtin’”. If anybody knows this word, please confirm or explain. No one I know is familiar with it. All I get when I search the Internet for it is things where people have misspelled “holding” and a site that mentions bile salts, whatever that is. (I’m not sure I want to know, but I bet it doesn’t have anything to do with going courtin’.)
I would love to know some expressions from other areas around the country, and from other English-speaking areas of the world, either current or past, just to be able to compare notes.
I was on another website recently where folks were talking about southern expressions, and I have seen a lot of pass-it-on emails about how to talk southern, a phenomenon which came into vogue when Jimmy Carter was elected President in the 70s, and which Jeff Foxworthy has raised to an art form all its own. I guess every region has expressions indigenous to their area, but thanks to television, the language is becoming almost homogeneous and regionalisms are disappearing. So many of them will go away as the Depression/WWII generation leaves us, and my generation (the baby boomers) are called “Cosmic Possums” because we’ll be the last generation (as a whole) to remember some of these expressions and know what they mean, even as we cease using them.
I was born in Texas, raised in Tennessee, have roots in Virginia so deep they come out in Asia, never lived north of Washington, DC, and have lived in Georgia for 17 years, so I am definitely southern. I always crack up when I hear southerners (usually women) who “swan” or “swannee”. I assume this was originated as a genteel form of saying, “Well, I swear”, when, fiddledeedee, evahbody knows we southern flowers are much too delicate to out-and-out swear (yeah, right!), and maybe “I do declare” wasn’t emphatic enough for the occasion. Sometimes I even heard “I swan to goodness”, which I guess was like swearing to the Almighty. My ex-mother-in-law (God rest her AKC-registered soul) used to swan and swannee with the best of them, and I always wished she would be honest enough to come out and swear, just once, instead of hiding behind water birds. She was so pretentious that she had a plaque in her house that said “something something something well, something something something hell” (sorry – I can’t remember exactly what it said), and someone (I feel sure it was her) marked out the word “hell” and wrote in “heck”. To me that was the most absurd thing – if you find it that offensive, just don’t have it in your house in the first place. Anyway, I digress. I don’t hear people swan or swannee much any more, but I still hate it, mainly because of her and because it sounds rather pretentious, if not outright ridiculous. I never could figure out how to conjugate the verb “to swan”. (Would the past participle be “have swun”?)
My sister pointed out the absurdity of my asking for a chocolate Coke when I was 10. At the time, I thought I was the only one who did it, and later realized what a southern thang it is. I also used to hear “pop” and “dope” for a soft drink before “dope” meant another kind of coke. Of course, every southerner knows that the proper pronunciation of Coke is “Co-Cola”.
My grandmothers used to say “directly” when they meant “soon” or an indeterminate time in the future, but they pronounced it “dreckly”, and for years I thought they were two different words. One of my former bosses, who couldn’t spell his own name to save his life and wouldn’t know correct grammar if it had bitten him on his hindquarters, used to tell me that the southern pronunciation wasn’t “dreckly”, it was “toreckly”. He kept on until I told him I was not going to argue with him about the proper MISpronunciation of a word.
My grandfather had a book of song lyrics he wrote down so he would be able to sing along, and they are not songs he wrote – just songs that were popular when he was a teenager. One of them is called “Holading”, and from the gist of the lyrics, I can only guess that “holadin’” was a term in the late 1800s/early 1900s for “courtin’”. If anybody knows this word, please confirm or explain. No one I know is familiar with it. All I get when I search the Internet for it is things where people have misspelled “holding” and a site that mentions bile salts, whatever that is. (I’m not sure I want to know, but I bet it doesn’t have anything to do with going courtin’.)
I would love to know some expressions from other areas around the country, and from other English-speaking areas of the world, either current or past, just to be able to compare notes.
Labels: Language
# posted by Anne Arky @ 9:13 AM 
