I’m reading aloud Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick to my students. The narrator, a 12-year-old boy named Max, bears a striking resemblance to his convict father (WHO TOTALLY KILLED MAX’S MOTHER IN FRONT OF HIM WHEN HE WAS LITTLE, BUT SHH, THAT’S FOR LATER). Another character comments that he’s the spitting image of his dad, so I was explaining to the kids where the expression “spitting image” came from: originally, people said “spirit and image”, but folks from coastal South Carolina don’t really pronounce their Rs. Voilà. Spittin’ image.
I like to think about the differences in southern dialects. In fact, I hate it when people say, “He has a southern accent.” What is that? Drive from Charleston to the opposite corner of the better Carolina, and you’d NEVER have gotten “spittin’ image”. For your enlightenment, in the Blue Ridge, the Rs are as hard as Sarah Palin’s, fortunately without the flat vowels (shudder), but, yes, Rs are very ARRRRy up yonderrrr.
Also, many monosyllabic words with short vowels get an extra syllable, so ran becomes rayun, pin is peeyun. Actually, both pin and pen are peeyun but if it’s the writing utensil, you say ink peeyun.
I’ll just keep going here. If it’s the first word in a sentence, the word it is pronounced with an H on the front, and since it fits the previous rule, it sounds like heeyut.
Regarding verbiage, you don’t push a button; you mash it, but it’s pronounced with almost a long a: maish. You also don’t turn the light off; you cut it off. And you better lift a fanger when somebody passes you on the road.
And if you ride bus 27 home from Cove Creek School, your bus driver will bang a spelling book against the metal ceiling and yell, Y’all better quieten down. Yep, quieten down, not quiet down. And for a long time, I thought quieten was a word. Years later we’d laugh at her redneck expression. But just now, since spellcheck didn’t pick it up, I looked it up and quieten is totally a word. Go on, Pat Shore, Driver of Bus 27 and Quietener of Children!
Now, one of these days, I’ll have to make a vlog of myself saying these things—ooh! and reenact my phone interview with a principal from Rocky Mount, and you could hear the difference a couple hundred miles make. I won’t right now because I haven’t showered, and I think you could probably smell me through the internet.
My point is: there’s no such thing as a southern accent. There are eleventy-five different southern dialects. (I had to stop watching True Blood because every character had a different southern accent, and only two of them were any good. Would it have been so hard for HBO to hire a dialect coach?)
Y’all wanna sheer (that’s share to you) what people say and how they pronounce thangs in yer neck o’ the woods?
Oh, and piece of shit is ‘peesasheeyut’. That’s for you, C. ;)
Orange is “arnge”
City sometimes comes out as “shitty”
My grandmother says “bollom” instead of bottom
My dad’s favorite curse word is “shittinass” as in “That shittinass boy ain’t no good”
Dan, shittinass is now my favorite word in the whole, wide world.
Greetings from up here in Bawstin!
I think Alex goes to school with a boy named Tim but when you ask Alex his name it’s Teeyum. But I really have no idea because I’ve never seen it written.
My family moved from NJ to WV when I was 11 years young. It took me about 3 months before I was able to comprehend what anyone was saying, not because of the slang but because of the accents. My favorite expression (which I’ll share with you when next we meet) was sheetfiiiiiiiireinnabucket.
New expletive for Amy!! Sheetfiiiiiiireinnabucket! Although, in Western NC, that would be sheeyuttfarrrrrrrrrinnabucket.
In the region of Arkansas where I’m from tomato is mater, potato is tater and banana is naner. I’ve also heard people pronounce Massachusetts as Mass-a-two-sits and Hawaii as Ha-why-ya.
One of my classmates in third grade asked the teacher how to spell ‘backer’. You know, the kind you roll up into cigarettes.
I went to a trial in Yadkinville where a bunch of backer farmers were suing a pesticide company. They called that stuff Tuh-bocka. Mostly rhymes with Chewbacca. Yadkinville is less than an hour and a half from backer-country. Amazing.
That’s crazy talk! Tuh-bocka!
(I hope the tuh-bocka farmers won.)
What’s the distance from Cove Creek to Beaver Creek? 30 miles? 50? Anyway, when I was trained to be the video girl at the local Ingles Video Counter in Beaver Creek, NC, I was trained to answer the phone like such: Eeyus is Angles, Ma’elp’ya? (translation: This is Ingles, May I help you?). Love my people. sigh.
Yes, other Amy! ‘This’ has no th at the beginning. Nor does ‘that’. Nor does ‘their’.
margo on dr d’s little laptop again. or where i growed up, agin. hard everthang up thar ‘n east tennessee. whar i learn’t to play pianeer. or they tried to larn me anyways. hit dint wurk much.
(when we stopped on the last road trip up in allentown, we had both dinner and breakfast at the queen city diner (only way i could afford to feed andrew!) every waitress and hostess said youse in place over every possible pronoun and some that weren’t. seemed like if you couldn’t fit youse into every sentence at least twice you were not allowed to work at the queen city diner.
People definitely say “y’all” up in Boone area, but I forgot you also hear “you’ns” just as much.
My ex-inlaw’s sister lives in Cove Crick….Small wurld. (hic)
one of my favorites: im funna. a derivative of im fixin to. which comes from im going to. also i taught at a camp in east nashville where the kids said “i gotta use it” when they needed to go to the bathroom. also, pyouncil. for pencil. ah, memories!
I had originally included “fixin’ to” in the post, but I took it out because that kind of shows up all over the south. But yes, my favorite pronunciation is “finna”.
and then there’s always the famous conversation heard around midday-
jeet? uhun, jew?
Hahahahahahahaha!
(Naw, I cud use a Moon Pah an a RC cola.)
dude! i quit watching “true blood” for the same reason!
Thank you. I feel validated.
Don’t fergit “Law” (theologically speaking).
Praise the Law!
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