Posted on 12/31/2009 11:04:42 AM PST by don-o
Too funny! My son could give them all lessons!
What they lack in meaning, they make up with gusto. There’s a lot of diaphragm in “Whattayou lookin’a ... ME?”
Oh yeah. I have heard that one as well. It makes you just want to haul off and deck them sometimes, doesn’t it?
I think it cooms from the old Scots version of words. :) Lots of Scottish people settled here.
Great topic.
Once had a nurse in a southern urologist’s office hand a plastic cup to me and say, “Here, penis”.
I’ve laughed for years over her comment and manner of speaking.
I got in enough trouble for muttering “Shut up” under my breath (I thought), when a “fast talker” was babbling in a nearby cubicle.
If there were a prize to be awarded, you would have it for that one!
Next time you are in southern Utah, I’ll give you my finest rendition of rural Utah farmer talk. One example is this: “What kind of tree is that? “Thum’s whut we call fer populuur trees.” My wife thinks I’m mocking when I adapt my own speech to theirs. In reality they have no clue as it all sounds perfect to their ears.
You wash your car with it, or put out fires.
Hey, now yer talkin'.
I'm a descendant of those Scots/Irish settlers (east Tennessee).
You should've seen the looks on the faces of some of the
guys from the big northern cities when I first went into
the Marine Corps, LOL. Sometimes I would take it too an extreme
just to mess with 'em.
"What the he!! is this hillbilly talking about?!"
Is this like, a vanity? I mean jeez, ya know?
Now that is funny! You can get in a lot of trouble slurring your words with unfamiliar people. People you’re around all the time hear the correct version. Others... LOL
My father, who is from NE Missouri, says "warsh" and "forrrr." And in Texas, we said, "fahrr" and "arrrn."
I’d always understood it to be a survial of Elizabethan English. That’s what the folks I know down that way believe. They’ve got an interesting geneaology through several old, prominent families there, including a fairly convincing claim of relation to Blackbeard, Edward Teach. Seems he had a little affair up the Tar at Grimesland Plantation. where his sister then resided. There are apparently letters somewhere that validate the claim.
It’s also where he supposedly buried his treasure, Grimesland. My sister went through a metal detector hobbyist phase in her teens, and my family spent many a hot summer day down there and around Bath with that thing. Found a few old coins, brass buttons and such, so it was interesting and not a total waste of time. But, no Blackbeard’s Treasure, lol.
Grates on the ears. But seems to be very common usage in the Portland, Oregon area.
Did you know that the Three Wise Men were firemen?
Well, they come from a far.
Jeatchet?==Did you eat yet. (My grandfather never ate, he ‘et.’ He would ask “you et?”)
Gnaw Jew?==No, did you
Gnaw, Yauntto?=No, [Do] you want to?
Shore!==Sure!
The best description of this phenomenon I've ever read.
He can count cards...I always lose.
A pretty obvious transition, based on dropping off phonemes, from “Pee in this” to “Pee i’ ‘is.” It’s the same process that gives us “di’int.”
Why dropping some sounds, from “did not” to “didn’t” is okay, but dropping more, from “didn’t” to “di’n’t” is wrong, I don’t get.
Then it’s a spin off [or isolated pocket] of Highland Southern because that’s exactly what that is.
My maternal grandmother was nearly incomprehensible to “outlanders” because so many bastardized Celtic and OE words peppered her conversations that people didn’t understand her.
One that I recall vividly was her use of “Oh! That stinks like kyarn!”
It baffled everybody until I told them she was actually saying “cairn” which is a partially above-ground burial ground.
Our syntax is “bizarre”, too.
Hubby grew up in Providence RI and was baffled when I was standing on the stairs and asked him to “Thow up a towel tummy”.
[Throw a towel up to me]
When we got married, for *years* I had to act as an “interpreter” between him and my dad.
[I’m “bilingual”; fluent in Hillbilly *and* proper English]...LOL
In civilized company, I speak one; at home, the other.
Some Rs we mute, some we drop, others we roll to death.
No apparent rhyme or reason to any of it.
Consonants and syllables?
We hate ‘em and drop ‘em every chance we get....:))
“Hunting” becomes almost monosyllabic “huntn” and “going” becomes “goyn”.
A proper hillbilly sentence containing the two words would run together; “Ahmgoynhuntn”.
[and if you were coming along, “Ahmgoynhuntnwitchew”]
Paradoxically, one of my high school friends could not understand how I always managed to get every vowel available into the simple word “dog”.
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