“Bless your heart” basically means I think you’re kind of retarded but I’m humouring you.
Thank you! I guessed something like that.
Well, it CAN mean that. I think this has been overemphasized on the SDMB, to the point where some non-Southerners think “Bless your heart” is always a dire insult. It can, and in my experience usually does, mean “I appreciate your kindness/thoughtfulness.”
Geographic Area: I would say the states that were in the Confederacy without the border states or south Florida.
My family: Most definitely eccentric and insane (with papers to prove it in many cases).
Favorite Southern artists and writers:
Truman Show all the way for 20th century. A writer named Jeremiah Clemens (distant cousin of Mark Twain, though there’s no evidence they knew each other) is one of my favorite of the 19th- long out of print but available full text online. For singers I’ll count Elvis, Dolly, and Ray Charles. For poetry: I’ll count Poe as southern.
Got any Confederate ancestors?
Yep, all privates which I think may be a distinction. One served in the 51st AL Partisan Rangers [a dragoons unit], another in the 3rd Alabama Cavalry [also dragoons], another kinda sorta in the 16th Alabama Infantry followed by the 47th Alabama Infantry (I say kinda sorta because between illness and injury he only fought a total of about 30 non-consecutive days before dying and being buried in this great Southern Gothic looking place), two in the Alabama Home Guard, one who deserted from the 15th Alabama Infantry (got evicted from a Confederate soldiers home in old age for it), and one who I can’t figure out why he didn’t fight. (He was in his late 20s or early 30s in the war and not wealthy; my guess is he either had an infirmity that wouldn’t show up in the Census [asthma, clubfoot, whatever] or perhaps he was an overseer of more than 20 slaves [he didn’t own any but his wife’s children from a previous marriage did]).
The ones who were in regular units all had brothers in the same unit, and all lost brothers in the war. One branch had close relatives who fought for the 1st Alabama (a Union regiment) but they weren’t in my direct ancestry.
My family’s lived in Alabama since before the Civil War on all sides, and the last ones to live above the Mason Dixon line were German and Scots-Irish emigrants to Pennsylvania who left there before the Revolution, so about as southern as you can get. One was an indentured servant from England who gave birth in 1706 to a daughter by a black father she refused to identify; I have the records of her trial. Her biracial daughter evidently had children with a white man, at least one of whom crossed the color line; he was my first ancestor in Alabama. (I’ve wondered how many of my fellow descendants know there’s coffee in our cream.)
This may sound ancestrally snobbish, but I see an asterix by his name whenever Stephen Colbert is referred to as southern. His father was a New Yorker and his mother a Midwesterner before moving to Charleston, and they were academics [i.e. gownies not townies] so I don’t really consider him “fully” Southern, just southern influenced.
I have amazingly little southern accent, especially considering that I grew up in the middle of nowhere in very rural Alabama. I attribute it to my mother’s inbred German family (seriously: most of her family were Swiss and German colonists who intermarried for literally centuries, and the first in Alabama [though’d they’d been in America a century by then] still spoke German dialects, and to this day they have a Germanic element to their voices), to the fact I watched a lot of TV, and to a slight stammer that made me have to be very precise about what I said as it came out; people actually guess I’m English more than they do that I’m southern.
Blues over jazz, though Old Time Country & bluegrass over either.
“Is there any place in Montgomery Alabama to buy computer disks?” The guy was dead serious. This was when I was working in a hotel as a desk clerk and checking him in. On a computer. (“Com-poo-ter- that’s like one of them TV sets hooked up to a typewriter with some jumper cables lookin’ thangs also…”.)
Another hotel guest asked if it was possible to get alcohol in Alabama; you can see the bar from the front desk. Oddly the one I found most insulting was a guest who checked in whose name wasn’t Horace Greeley but it was one just as famous and associated with NYC or even just general 19th century American history. While I’d never make a comment if a guest had a name like John Kennedy or George Washington because you know they’ve heard it a million times, this name was just obscure enough that he probably heard it a lot less often, so in small talk I asked “are you related to {the publisher Horace Greeley}?” {again, the name wasn’t Horace Greeley, but it’s that well known and that era} and he said “Yes, he was my great-great-uncle, I’m actually {Horace Greeley IV} [or whatever]” and then said “I’m impressed. How in the world does a desk clerk know who {the publisher Horace Greeley} even was?” then added “Well, I can tell you’re not from here.”
I just gave him his room key and a non-committal answer and thought “frigging regionalist provincial asswipe… just assumes southerners don’t read… just like your {great-great-uncle the publisher Horace Greeley} probably did”.
Of course ironically he was right. I used to have a boss whose surname really was Van Buren- a descendant of the family, not the president- and he was always amazed at how when somebody asked him to repeat or spell his surname he would say “Van Buren… like the president, Martin Van Buren”, and usually get “Huh?” or have his surname written down as Martin or the occasional “What president was named Martin Van Buren?” However, by his own admission (he wasn’t southern and didn’t particularly like the south, though a nice guy and he liked me personally) he got asked that just as much in Las Vegas and southern Florida and other places as he did in the Dixylvania.
Away from Alabama I’ve been asked if I’ve personally ever seen a lynching (though that was from a dumbass I’ll admit) and somebody asked if I smoke because I growing up in the middle of tobacco country [Alabama grows about enough tobacco to make three cartons of cigarettes- tobacco country is way to the north and east]). One asked if I knew of any restaurants that served chitlins and or moonshine; I told him “That is regional stereotyping… and the answer’s yes”. (Which it was- two different places though, and the moonshine is of the legal variety like this; openly selling the illegal is too risky for many reasons and no cheaper than ‘real’ liquor [the main reason people buy moonshine today is strictly because they like the taste].)
Absolutely, the inferred meaning can only be derived by the tone of the delivery
As someone else has already described, it can meaning anything from “go to hell” to “I’m sorry you were treated that way.” Most often it means something like, “Dude!”
Sorry Flickster, I hadn’t read the newest posts.
Bless my heart.
This gave me the hysterical image of my Louisiana-native mother-in-law saying “Dude!” in her Southern drawl. 
Hey, I’m translating between two languages here, bless your little heart!
I had to take my dog to the vet for surgery and the assistant held him saying “Bless your heart…” and it meant “poor little baby, it’s going to be okay”.
Yesterday I was at convenience store worker while an old lady went ON AND ON about her pains and the clerk said “Oh… bless your heart”, meaning “I’m sorry, now please go away there’s a line behind you”.
I offered a co-worker some toffee covered almonds and she replied “Bless your heart” meaning “Thanks!”
Totally context.
I agree 100%. I’m not sure how this got so blown out of proportion here, but the vast majority of the time it means “You poor thing” or “thank you so much for what you’ve done”. Occasionally it means, “You’re an idiot, but can’t help it.”
Depending on when this was, that may have been me. No offense to the South was meant, just trying to find a specific item in a small, unfamiliar town; how should the question be phrased?
I do have one good story about that city that I can’t resist sharing, though. Leaving a restruant at the end of one of my trips there, I stopped to hold the door for a couple of grandmotherly ladies. One of them said that she was glad to see that manners still existed in the South. “Ma’am, I’m from Boston”.
Makes up for the two women who ran in terror when I held a door for them in Nashua.
My Father says his grandmother had this look in her eye. She was a joker. My wife says that my father has what’s probably the same look in his eye, and our middle son has it as well.
I like Celia Rivenbark. She’s hilarious.
My Great-Great-Grandfather received a commission in the Georgia Militia as a Captain at the beginning of the war. Due to continued disbandment of which ever unit he would be assigned to, he ended the war as a corporal. He did get elected to the legislature later on though.
Not that I know of. The non-quaker parts of my mother’s family were all farmers.
My father is a native North Carolinian, his father was from Georgia, as were the previous four generations. Prior to that, the [Magills] came from the Virginia Colony. John [Magill] was a crewman on the ship that brought the original Jamestown colonists. He wasn’t a colonist, though. About ten years after the colony was established, he received a land grant from King James, and the [Magills have been here ever since.
My Mother is from Connecticut, and came from a long line of Connecticut farmers.
I don’t have an accent, I talk like everyone else from Raleigh.
Seriously - This must be an artifact of your Mississippi accent. There is no one Southern Accent.
Neither. My southern music preference is Old Time/Bluegrass.
Probably with the same number of syllables as “bless your heart”.
I think so too. My daughter, raised here in Mississippi, used to pronounce “elbow” in a way that sounded more like “eyeball”. I’ve heard this “ladder/lighter” thing which Mississippienne is talking about, but usually 'round here, not elsewhere in the south.
Stephen Moyer, the English actor who plays the former Confederate soldier turned vampire Bill Compton on True Blood, told a hilarious story about his little girl (about 5 or 6) when he was on a talk show recently. He’s long separated from the girl’s mother but they share custody and the girl lives in England and has an English accent, but she lived with him [and new squeeze/co-star Anna Paquin] in Louisiana while he was shooting. The nanny he hired was local, kiwi Paquin frequently practiced her accent and read lines with Stephen [who uses a sort of Elvis-y twang] at home, and in days the girl went to a local elementary school of some sort (not sure if it was daycare, kindergarten or first grade).
Anyway, one day he picked her up and suggested that they go have dinner and then to a movie, but there was a TV show she wanted to see instead so she told him, in a flawless southern accent, “No daddy… I wanna git on ho-ome and watch tee-Vee”. He said he almost had a heart attack at how much of the local dialect she’d absorbed just in a couple of weeks.
Well, I’m a yankee transplant living in the south for about ten years. I’ll do my best.
Sounds good to me, but I would distinguish the South (which includes Tennessee where I am) from the Deep South (which does not).
They are New Englanders. 'nuff said.
Easy – Flannery O’Connor.
Union on both sides. My great-great-great-grandfather on my dad’s side fought in the 13th Wisconsin Infantry and my great-great-grandfather on my mom’s side fought for New Jersey. Both of them fought here in Tennessee, actually, and the one on my Mom’s side died in battle here in Nashville.
Pure-blood yankees: I’m the transplant. I love me some pecan pie, but gag on sweet tea. Can’t do grits or biscuits & gravy, either.
I’ve got more of a standard Midwestern accent, so no troubles there, but no one confuses me for local.
Sacrilege…well, I might be able to overlook the grits part, but biscuits & gravy :eek:
The scriptures aren’t exactly clear; I think that white gravy is excluded from sacrilege, certainly storebought gravies are, though brown and redeye are very specific- not liking either is sacrilege. (Scrambled eggs mixed with grits covered with redeye and served with ham on a redeyed soggy biscuit- the breakfast of Olympus.)
What is the South?: This is complex. I sort think of it being a continuum from the Deep South on outward. So, for example, I think of Alabama as very Southern, Tennessee somewhat less so, Kentucky even less so, and southern Ohio as only vaguely Southern at best.
Eccentric/Insane Family?: somewhat.
Favorite Southern artists and writers?: No opinion.
Got any Confederate ancestors? Got any Union ancestors?: All Union ancestors (this is common in East Tennessee).
Are your parents Southerners or Yankee transplants?: one of each.
You more of a blues person or a jazz person?: jazz.
Weirdest question someone’s asked you about your home state: People are so opinionated one way or the other about the South that I hear few genuine questions about my state of origin, just opinions.