Southernisms

I spent my childhood in Georgia. It’s fair to say I have a southern accent. To the point where my East Tennessee relatives would laugh at my pronunciation of certain words. Everyone else called our grandmother Granny – I said “Grain-ee”. I called flowers “flyers” and the sink, a “sank”. This is not entirely my fault. My grandfather pronounced my name “Turri” to rhyme with his pronunciation of my mother Mary’s name as “Murray”. Just to confuse things, my older sister pronounced my name “Tear-ie.”

I’ve outgrown many of my mispronunciations, but no one would ever question my Southern roots. I still say y’all, no you’ens.

When I began writing The House at Blackwater Pond, I did not sit down and deliberate my characters’ dialect or diction. I just listened to them and tried to faithfully represent their language on the page. That’s right, I heard them in my head. No cause for alarm. I don’t think that’s unusual for a writer. In truth, Beth Ann sounds an awful lot like my Granny. I can still hear her talking about leaving d’rectly or things looking kindly different nowadays.

As is typical in the South and in Appalachia, the language is colorful, full of euphemism, simile, metaphor and hyperbole and often related to a more rural way of life.

I have an early memory, although it’s vague in the way of such things, of standing in the back of one of my uncle’s trucks and him telling my dad as he pointed at me, that I, “that ‘un,” was “mean as a black snake.” I’m not sure what, if anything, I had done or said to warrant such a description, but I was really more concerned about the snake than any aspersions on my character.

It’s not that I was afraid of snakes. My dad taught science and people often brought him snakes to share in his classroom. I knew black snakes weren’t venomous nor aggressive, so why would Wilfred (which I pronounced Woof-erd) think they were mean?

If I ever got an answer to that question, I’ve forgotten, but every time I hear a Southernism about animals, that memory returns. We would talk about someone having a ‘bee in her bonnet,’ being ‘madder than a wet hen,” or an object being “scarce as hen’s teeth.” My dad was often “so hungry he could eat a horse.”

A long-winded speaker might “preach to the choir” “until the cows came home” unless the listener had the sense to say, “Let me let you go.”

Some sayings are so common they don’t need to be finished:  pot-kettle; rock-hard place; frying pan-fire; apple-tree

I did not include a lot of these sayings in this novel, but I did use some some words or phonetic spellings that made sense to me, if not to my editor.

Randy Keith says orta meaning ought to. Beth Ann says Law instead of Lord. Some people say Lawd, but my Granny didn’t. She said Law so that’s what I wrote. Sometimes she’d substitute Land or, if she was really riled up, Land o’Goshen. Rather than say My Lord my Granny would say They law. No one in my family ever swore, as in I swear it’s raining cats and dogs out there. It was always I declare or I swan.

All these expressions and a family love of story-telling helped me visualize the world and that’s better than buying a pig in a poke any day of the week.

What are your favorite expressions? Are there any you just don’t understand?