— If a boy had been in Lexington and came home talking like a Yankee, you might say:
“He’s gittin’ above his raisin’.”
— What about someone who was unwilling to help you?
"He wouldn’t give me air in a jug."
— If you felt unfairly treated?
"I wouldn’t sarve a dawg like that."
— Someone who’s uncultured is
"rough as a cob."
— A reminder to pray is
"Don’t forget what your knees are made for."
— How do you say somebody is pathetic?
"He’s sorrier ‘n karn." (Karn is a mining term meaning a pile of rocks.)
— To say something is far away:
"Hit’s a right smart piece."
— Somebody who grew up poor
"come up hard."
Who but Kycol would have found us this article about folks who talk a whole lot like a lot of us do (at least when we’re relaxing). Smoky Mountain speech may be savory and closer to Shakespeare’s than any other English on this continent, but — alas — it’s also right hard on the ol’ job prospects. So some nice folks at the University of Kentucky (and elsewhere) are trying to meet a double challenge: both help preserve the dialect but also help neutralize the negative social impressions that its use often carries. ‘At ‘ere’s a toughie.
Two more sites I’m glad Kycol passed along belong to a professor at the U of South Carolina who’s making an enjoyable life’s-work of Appalachian English. He’s posted this dictionary and transcripts (with audio) of speech collected in the Smokies in 1939. Click on that, and you may just swear you hear your grandparents again for the first time in all these years.
(How I wish I could too, but somehow or somehow else yesterday, I lost the audio on this thing. If anyone has time to advise me on getting it back, please drop an email to my address at top right. Thanks!)
wonder if “karn” is kin to “cairn”. my dictionary says “cairn” is from the Scottish Gaelic “carn”.
I think it is, duckweedpond. Just as an aside, when I was working in the oil patch up in central Michigan, “karn” is how the word “corn” was pronounced. It was a bit startling to hear it.
Came across a pithy Southernism the other night while reading some Civil War letters. A Confederate soldier writing to his folks was complaining about his officers: “The major is a fine man. The rest of ‘em ain’t fit to tote guts to a bear.”
Surely must be, ducky.
Hey, Dragoman. That one’s good ‘n’ tangy, innit?
Speaking of cobs, my ol’ daddy, an Ozarker, used to say “silly as a goose hit in the head with a frozen cob.” Always figured there must be a story behind that, but he never told it.
As an interloper I have been both amused and fascinated by the language issues.
Soem of my locals say Starksville, nonlocals never learned it that way…
My nurse 8 years ago was an LPN with strong local cred that had a brief conversation with an Oxford orthopod, a self described Hahhvahhd Orthopedic doc. I was a good boy- I did not call back and recite my fancy pants Ivy league credentials to get in a p***in’ contest with him. He was appalled at her communication skills and some local idiom that I do not recall. He suggested I fire her and find someone more articulate. As you might imagine my patients loved her and her major issues were organizational.
Twenty years ago my wife, then a Vanderbilt nurse, memorized this short description from a hill lady:
I went to go a standin’ , my secrets fell out , then I been a wastin’ away ever since.”
Interpretation to follow.
NL
My Dad was born and raised at Cutshin Creek, KY and left the mines in the Hazard and Harlan area at the age of 20 to fight in WW ll. After the war he married a WAC from the burley belt of Western KY and they settled there. Even though he left the mountains they never left him and now at the age of 87 they still haven’t. I recall some of the things he said which at the time sounded perfectly common in our house. I was grown before I realized a prize bar was actually called a pry bar. Other beauts are calling a dark night “blacker’n ol coalie’s ass, hit you make you whiz like a wire nail and tighter’n Dick’s hat band. A black and white calf was called a “pieded calf”. His ultimate insult was to tell someone to “Kiss my royal red hillbilly ass”. After 60 years of nagging Mom finally got him in church and baptized so He no longer starts most exclamatory sentences with Son or Mother or God. He still smokes but has slowed down a little on his drinking. Think those two vices will kill him? He has smoked since he was seven, that’s 80 years. He said when he started that rolling tobacco was called Hoover Dust. I suppose that was to honor another great Republican Economist.
“Tighter’n Dick’s hatband” was popular in my fambly too, Kycol. Also “bizzier’n a three-legged hawg on ice” (a personal favorite of mine).
Anyhow, bravo to your Paw! To the great GOPer Economists, eh, not so much.
“Pieded” for piebald, no doubt. I used to have a piebald cat.
What is “piebald”? I’ve never really understood what that one means (“pied” = “checkered,” right? so in the case of a cat, maybe calico or tortoiseshell?).
As I was telling Kycol, this new cat of mine, Isom Hadaway, musta had at least one gran’maw who was a Vienna Fingers cookie. I look at him and get hungrier for one of those than I’ve been in years. I been good, though, and haven’t bought any.
Piebald is black and white spotted – a white animal with large black spots, or a black animal with large white spots. Most times you see it used to describe a cow.
This cat I had was white with large black splotches – called him Bootser for some reason.
A little more on Pied.
pied
1382, as if it were the pp. of a verb form of M.E. noun pie “magpie” (see pie (2)), in ref. to the bird’s black and white plumage. Earliest use is in reference to the pyed freres, an order of friars who wore black and white. Also in pied piper (1845, in Browning’s poem based on the Ger. legend; used allusively from 1942).
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper
Well, Kycol just got pied by the spam filter (a habit of which I’m becoming rather weary today).
Hey, Colonel … Suggest to your daddy that he cut back on his Hoover Dust and maybe increase his whisky intake a bit. I’d really like to meet your daddy … it’s getting harder and harder to find men who still know how to be the roosters in their yard.