FReepmail me or KoRn to get on or off the Waffle House Ping List.
Posted on 08/02/2014 7:14:02 AM PDT by SamAdams76
My wife and I arrived in Mobile four years ago. As we drove from Pennsylvania into the deep South, I began to notice the subtle changes that became increasingly less subtle...
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.edu ...
FReepmail me or KoRn to get on or off the Waffle House Ping List.
I’ve had Southern Waitresses call me Hon, Sweetie and Sugar.
They must have a Sweet Tooth.
I couldn’t read the whole thing but it’s definitely an affectionate if wildly overlong and over analytical essay.
I love the South! In 1997, I took my husband to a hangar type of restaurant in Montgomery, Alabama. He had never had grits before. I told the waitress and she went back into the kitchen and brought out the entire staff - including the chef - to watch him take his first bite of grits. The chef had lovingly doled on some butter and salt. That’s the same year I discovered red velvet cake.
LOL, if you don’t like being called honey, you better not go to any of the diners in South Jersey, although waitresses there usually call you dear.
Imagine the crap he would writing if he found out half the people eating at Waffle House are Carrying.
The biggest problem with this guy is he teaches at the University of South Alabama, and the poor students who are his subjects to masticate and bloviate on.
Incidentally, I teach at Auburn University, but thankfully it’s just ConEd so I don’t get many kids—basically adults who know better.
LOL. Like being called “dear” at the grocery checkout. Has no significance whatsoever.
But, during all the author's time in Pennsylvania, hadn't he ever been to Philadelphia? Every female cashier, waitress, and front office person will call everyone more than 10 years younger than they are "Hon." And men do it too (but only to women). I myself call my wife "Hon" and occasionally my daughters and daughters in law.
Yeah, I don't know where the hell this guy's been. I'm Philadelphia born and bred and waitresses have been calling me "hon" or "honey" for years. I guess sometimes "dear" too now that you mention it.
It is a scream! I close my eyes and think I am at a family reunion.
Clinton disagrees. Not sure what Bill thinks.
Making note, honey
The author isn’t from New England...nor is Mitt Romney for that matter.
I call it "trying to be the smartest guy in the room."
Seconded.
You should publish that, if only to tick “Dr” Lunceford off.
Jesus, just be glad she didn’t say “ bless your heart”.
That’s how you can say something nasty about someone in the South.
Just follow whatever you say with “ bless his/ her heart.”
‘My but you are an arogant, ignorant Yankee, bless your heart...”
Nah. I didn’t proofread it and left a typo in there.
To this one, I will respond. The entire essay seems to have a singular goal of making sure women in the South do not allow themselves to become subservient to men with the exception of Brett Lunceford, the all-inspiring customer of choice when it comes to serving someone from the West, then the North and now unfortunately the South. The essay repeatedly uses the word "power" in the context of who is trying to see with whom to establish relationship, over whom to exert power and over whom to ultimately establish control through use of "rhetorical" linguistics. He uses vocabulary only a "Professor of Communication", as he so deftly informs us, would understand. Mr. Lunceford repeatedly cites sources of whom we have never heard who are apparently experts on the nuances of communication. It becomes obvious that those of us from the South have severe deficiencies in this arena and are unable to recognize proper relationship boundaries, especially when entering a restaurant.
Apparently being mistakenly called "honey" by a waitress who did not recognize the man's true character nor realize he certainly isn't anyone's honey was just too much for Brett. He does acknowledge that his elementary teacher wife uses the term "honey" when addresses her precious 2nd-grade charges who live in the South, but only because she has moved to the South. The move, in large part, might be an attempt to get away from the disrespectful, heartless, criminal, robotic-emotion types from Pennsylvania and the West Coast. He does correctly cite Mark Bazer who says that the use of "honey" by waitresses is to make the customer feel at home. So again, the assertion must be made that Lunceford has been mistakenly called "honey" by waitresses because they don't realize that they don't want to make him feel at home, but rather actually desire that he return home.
Brett also dutifully quotes Robert Sutton and Anat Rafaeli as stating that waitresses (and presumably chauvinist male waiters) are seeking to earn tips with friendliness, something he apparently doesn't possess nor care much about learning for a personality characteristic. Now, if only waiters and waitresses (who would not be able to even read his verbose critique of them) at the low-end restaurants patronized by perfesser Lunceford who with his school teacher wife, who have the means to eat at finer establishments with staff appropriately educated on how to communicate with those who have a completely distorted view of their communicative abilities, knew to ask, "Are you Brett Lunceford?", they would NOT call him honey and the problem would be solved.
All of this brings to mind the Dunning-Kruger effect. It basically describes someone as believing they have skills and abilities that are superior and that everyone around them is incompetent or of lesser skill and can not even be taught any differently. Lunceford, perhaps you might try to learn to be nice to the people waiting on you and don't worry what terms they use to address you unless one of them uses a pejorative term. And, what do we from the South know? We can barely talk and certainly can't write anything of substance.
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