Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Newark anymore...
Showing posts with label southern. Show all posts
Showing posts with label southern. Show all posts
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Seasonal guests
"Palmetto" is such a pretty word--"palm" so tropical, "etto" so diminutive. Surely it's a lovely thing to sit under the fan-shaped leaves of a palmetto on a warm summer's eve, sipping an ice-cold freshly-squeezed limeade.
By extension, "palmetto bug" sounds pretty too. So genteel, so southern. Nowhere near as disgusting as, say, "common American cockroach." No one would mind a palmetto bug or two dropping by during limeade time, whereas the common American cockroach would be most unwelcome.
In North Carolina, after temps have been in the humid upper 90s for a few weeks, the palmetto bugs come out from wherever they hide during the rest of the year. They come out at night with their friends--the hideously ugly, high-jumping, brown-gray camel crickets, who have proliferated so extensively that their population no longer fits in the crawl space under the house--and they hang out, uninvited, all over the expansive southern front porch, enjoying the relative coolth.
Because we call them "palmetto bugs" and not "foot-long common American cockroaches," when we cross paths outside I stoically sigh, avert my eyes, and pretend they aren't there. But when they come inside and rummage around in our silverware drawer--well, that's just rude. That's when I call for backup.
It turns out palmetto bugs hold the record for "Fastest Running Insect on the Planet," so about half the time, they get away (usually with no more than a spoon or two) before the sole of S's shoe can squash their guts out. When they escape under the microwave oven or clothes dryer, there is little we can do other than move on and hope they close the door behind them when they return to their native habitat. (North Carolinians will tell you palmetto bugs live alone outside, rather than between the walls with hundreds of cousins. Thank goodness.)
By extension, "palmetto bug" sounds pretty too. So genteel, so southern. Nowhere near as disgusting as, say, "common American cockroach." No one would mind a palmetto bug or two dropping by during limeade time, whereas the common American cockroach would be most unwelcome.
In North Carolina, after temps have been in the humid upper 90s for a few weeks, the palmetto bugs come out from wherever they hide during the rest of the year. They come out at night with their friends--the hideously ugly, high-jumping, brown-gray camel crickets, who have proliferated so extensively that their population no longer fits in the crawl space under the house--and they hang out, uninvited, all over the expansive southern front porch, enjoying the relative coolth.
Because we call them "palmetto bugs" and not "foot-long common American cockroaches," when we cross paths outside I stoically sigh, avert my eyes, and pretend they aren't there. But when they come inside and rummage around in our silverware drawer--well, that's just rude. That's when I call for backup.
It turns out palmetto bugs hold the record for "Fastest Running Insect on the Planet," so about half the time, they get away (usually with no more than a spoon or two) before the sole of S's shoe can squash their guts out. When they escape under the microwave oven or clothes dryer, there is little we can do other than move on and hope they close the door behind them when they return to their native habitat. (North Carolinians will tell you palmetto bugs live alone outside, rather than between the walls with hundreds of cousins. Thank goodness.)
Monday, March 15, 2010
Suth'n humor
One of my all-time favorite jokes is bilingual, involving English and French.
"Why do the French like to eat just one egg for breakfast?"
Give up?
--Because "one egg" is "un oeuf" (enough).
Driving E and D home from school this afternoon, I was treated to my very first bilingual joke involving English and Suth'n. Interestingly, like the English/French joke, the English/Suth'n joke also involves numbers and food. D read out loud from the student newpaper:
"Why is it dangerous to do math in the jungle?"
Ready?
--Because when you add four plus four, you get eight.
The kids said, "I don't get it." D had to read the punchline aloud a few more times before she and E burst out laughing. To their credit, they understand that around here, you're more likely to get et or eaten than to get ate, but as with un oeuf/enough, we allow precise pronunciations to slide for the pleasure of the bilingual riddle.
What I like best about the joke, in addition to what it presumes about readers' fluency in American regional dialects, is its easy-going insertion of Southerners into far-off exotic jungles in order to get them et. Surely sharks, alligators, and a myriad of urban predators resent arithmetic as much as their subtropical kin.
"Why do the French like to eat just one egg for breakfast?"
Give up?
--Because "one egg" is "un oeuf" (enough).
Driving E and D home from school this afternoon, I was treated to my very first bilingual joke involving English and Suth'n. Interestingly, like the English/French joke, the English/Suth'n joke also involves numbers and food. D read out loud from the student newpaper:
"Why is it dangerous to do math in the jungle?"
Ready?
--Because when you add four plus four, you get eight.
The kids said, "I don't get it." D had to read the punchline aloud a few more times before she and E burst out laughing. To their credit, they understand that around here, you're more likely to get et or eaten than to get ate, but as with un oeuf/enough, we allow precise pronunciations to slide for the pleasure of the bilingual riddle.
What I like best about the joke, in addition to what it presumes about readers' fluency in American regional dialects, is its easy-going insertion of Southerners into far-off exotic jungles in order to get them et. Surely sharks, alligators, and a myriad of urban predators resent arithmetic as much as their subtropical kin.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
King's Red & White
Neighborhood email groups are great things. How else, for example, would we have learned that King's Red & White recently started carrying milk from Maple View Farms? Maple View Farms is an area dairy that treats its cows well and sells milk in returnable glass bottles.
King's Red & White is a local, family-run grocery store. It's closer to our house than Kroger's and Whole Foods, but because it's small, inconspicuous, and surrounded by similarly unattractive buildings and ridiculous amounts of concrete on an over-developed, ugly stretch of road, it's hard to think of it as a neighborhood grocery store when you're driving past it in rush-hour traffic. Today, because we had read about the milk, we took our business to King's Red & White for the very first time.
At King's Red & White, the very tall, cheerful manager sashays past in aisle three, greeting you with a friendly "how're y'all today?" His employees know long-time customers by name and enjoy ongoing jokes with them with an easy familiarity.
Jars of North Carolina pickled unidentifiables (you have to trust the labels) in assorted shapes and colors line the shelves alongside local honeys, jams, jellies, butters, and preserves. There's an entire section in the sugary-junk aisle dedicated to rock candy. If you want to buy something in a can, you've come to the right place, but there's also a side room dedicated to fresh fruits and vegetables. Just outside the room, bananas hang on a special rotatable banana rack, looking quaintly old-fashioned against a backdrop of green astroturf. In refreshing contrast to other stores, everything that's out of season actually looks out of season at King's Red & White--but you can also tell when things are fresh. Bags of Georgia pecans ("New Crop!") fill a basket; shelled pinto beans ("New Crop!") come in bulk.
Alas, surrounded by all this Southern splendour, I walked with vegetarian obliviousness right past the butt rub and slop mop in aisle two. S, fortunately, was more alert, and after we left the store, he told me excitedly about seeing these icons of North Carolina barbeque. Of course, now we have to go back. And to think we would have missed it all had they not started carrying locally produced, environmentally friendly, rBGH-free milk.
King's Red & White is a local, family-run grocery store. It's closer to our house than Kroger's and Whole Foods, but because it's small, inconspicuous, and surrounded by similarly unattractive buildings and ridiculous amounts of concrete on an over-developed, ugly stretch of road, it's hard to think of it as a neighborhood grocery store when you're driving past it in rush-hour traffic. Today, because we had read about the milk, we took our business to King's Red & White for the very first time.
At King's Red & White, the very tall, cheerful manager sashays past in aisle three, greeting you with a friendly "how're y'all today?" His employees know long-time customers by name and enjoy ongoing jokes with them with an easy familiarity.
Jars of North Carolina pickled unidentifiables (you have to trust the labels) in assorted shapes and colors line the shelves alongside local honeys, jams, jellies, butters, and preserves. There's an entire section in the sugary-junk aisle dedicated to rock candy. If you want to buy something in a can, you've come to the right place, but there's also a side room dedicated to fresh fruits and vegetables. Just outside the room, bananas hang on a special rotatable banana rack, looking quaintly old-fashioned against a backdrop of green astroturf. In refreshing contrast to other stores, everything that's out of season actually looks out of season at King's Red & White--but you can also tell when things are fresh. Bags of Georgia pecans ("New Crop!") fill a basket; shelled pinto beans ("New Crop!") come in bulk.
Alas, surrounded by all this Southern splendour, I walked with vegetarian obliviousness right past the butt rub and slop mop in aisle two. S, fortunately, was more alert, and after we left the store, he told me excitedly about seeing these icons of North Carolina barbeque. Of course, now we have to go back. And to think we would have missed it all had they not started carrying locally produced, environmentally friendly, rBGH-free milk.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Don't be doing that
Tonight at my pottery class, being the safety geek that I am, I advised a student intent on carving a nearly bone-dry pot to do it over the sink: "You really don't want to be breathing in all that clay dust," I said, observing the powdery accumulation on the table and in her lap.
As soon as I uttered it, I realized I had an authentic use of an acquired Southernism on my hands. I plucked it from the air, put it in my pocket, and present it now for you, gentle readers:
Don't + be + Verb-ing.
Try it:
Don't be leaving your coat on the floor!
Eww, gross, don't be licking that!
You can pretend to know other people's inner desires by inserting the verb want after don't, as in:
You don't want to be teasing the cat, he'll scratch you.
A little Googling reveals that such constructions belong to a broader category of be-usage called the habitual be. The habitual be is a way to indicate a continuous directive. When you say Don't be licking that, you mean it's a bad idea, now and in the future, to lick that, so don't do it. By comparison, the briefer command, don't lick that, is a more limited imperitive: certainly you should not lick that, but you don't necessarily need to make a habit of not licking it because, after all, how often is the opportunity to lick it going to present itself?
How the habitual be arrived in the southern U.S. is unclear: it's common in Irish English as well as African-American Vernacular English, among other dialects. And to be honest, I'm assuming it's Southern only because I don't remember it invading my own speech anywhere else in the country.
As soon as I uttered it, I realized I had an authentic use of an acquired Southernism on my hands. I plucked it from the air, put it in my pocket, and present it now for you, gentle readers:
Don't + be + Verb-ing.
Try it:
Don't be leaving your coat on the floor!
Eww, gross, don't be licking that!
You can pretend to know other people's inner desires by inserting the verb want after don't, as in:
You don't want to be teasing the cat, he'll scratch you.
A little Googling reveals that such constructions belong to a broader category of be-usage called the habitual be. The habitual be is a way to indicate a continuous directive. When you say Don't be licking that, you mean it's a bad idea, now and in the future, to lick that, so don't do it. By comparison, the briefer command, don't lick that, is a more limited imperitive: certainly you should not lick that, but you don't necessarily need to make a habit of not licking it because, after all, how often is the opportunity to lick it going to present itself?
How the habitual be arrived in the southern U.S. is unclear: it's common in Irish English as well as African-American Vernacular English, among other dialects. And to be honest, I'm assuming it's Southern only because I don't remember it invading my own speech anywhere else in the country.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
You guys 'n' y'all
One of the more unfortunate shifts in the English language a few centuries back was the fusing of thou and ye into the single, all-encompassing you, a pronoun that now stands for both you-singular and you-plural. (One of the cleverer shifts has been the consequent elimination of you-formal, which is what you formerly was, but that's another story.) I thought Southerners had cornered the market on a solution with the brilliant second-person plural pronoun y'all, but thanks to my new copy of How We Talk: American Regional English Today by Allan Metcalf (2000), I am reminded that I grew up with the Northerner's version of the same: you guys.
You guys, like y'all, isn't something one sees in formal prose. Unlike y'all, it has the disadvantage of being blatantly gendered. Although one might hail a group of both males and females with the phrase hey you guys!, the word guys without a preceding you is distinctly masculine. (Metcalf explains that the word guys originated in reference to effigies of the 17th-century wannabe English Parliament blower-upper, Guy Fawkes. Fawkes' "Gunpowder Plot" was foiled on November 5, 1605, and celebrations of Guy Fawkes Day began in the 18th century. The OED dates the word guy to the early 19th century.)
You guys, because it includes an unadulterated you, is somewhat awkward when it comes to possessive forms. Turn down you guys's car radio sounds strange, even though it's dialectally correct, while Turn down your guys's car radio is just plain wrong, since it suggests that whoever you is controls guys rather than a shared car radio. Change the command to a simple Turn down your car radio and the editor breathes a concise sigh of relief, but the you-plural is lost.
Y'all has the benefit of dropping the -ou while retaining the y-, so the pronoun loses some of its obvious you-ness. One can thus derive possessive forms of y'all with relative ease, as in Turn down y'all's car radio. The especially enthusiastic speaker might emphasize the pluralness of y'all by making it y'alls, thus, Turn down y'alls's car radios. If more than about three folks are making a ruckus, one could say All y'all might should turn down the car radio. It's a bizarre twist, that all y'all, for its existence suggests y'all itself is on the way to becoming singular.
Metcalf mentions a few other you-plural options: yiz (in Philadelphia, where yous is the singular); yinz (in Pittsburgh, derived from you ones); and youse and you-uns, both regional Northern variants. Take y'alls's picks, but I'm sticking with the Southern solution.
You guys, like y'all, isn't something one sees in formal prose. Unlike y'all, it has the disadvantage of being blatantly gendered. Although one might hail a group of both males and females with the phrase hey you guys!, the word guys without a preceding you is distinctly masculine. (Metcalf explains that the word guys originated in reference to effigies of the 17th-century wannabe English Parliament blower-upper, Guy Fawkes. Fawkes' "Gunpowder Plot" was foiled on November 5, 1605, and celebrations of Guy Fawkes Day began in the 18th century. The OED dates the word guy to the early 19th century.)
You guys, because it includes an unadulterated you, is somewhat awkward when it comes to possessive forms. Turn down you guys's car radio sounds strange, even though it's dialectally correct, while Turn down your guys's car radio is just plain wrong, since it suggests that whoever you is controls guys rather than a shared car radio. Change the command to a simple Turn down your car radio and the editor breathes a concise sigh of relief, but the you-plural is lost.
Y'all has the benefit of dropping the -ou while retaining the y-, so the pronoun loses some of its obvious you-ness. One can thus derive possessive forms of y'all with relative ease, as in Turn down y'all's car radio. The especially enthusiastic speaker might emphasize the pluralness of y'all by making it y'alls, thus, Turn down y'alls's car radios. If more than about three folks are making a ruckus, one could say All y'all might should turn down the car radio. It's a bizarre twist, that all y'all, for its existence suggests y'all itself is on the way to becoming singular.
Metcalf mentions a few other you-plural options: yiz (in Philadelphia, where yous is the singular); yinz (in Pittsburgh, derived from you ones); and youse and you-uns, both regional Northern variants. Take y'alls's picks, but I'm sticking with the Southern solution.
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