I’m not a linguist or anything (so take this with un grano de sal), but here’s what I understand about it. Since its slang, it evolves from its more formal use to the way it’s used colloquially now.
From it’s use to mean “that” or “that one” (or “esos,” those), it evolved (or devolved) into "dude (and by extension, friend, pal, buddy), as in:
¿Quién es el gordo ese?
Who’s that fat guy? (or dude, etc.)
¿Quién es ese?
Who’s that (guy)? (or dude, etc.)
I guess it got to the point of being used as shorthand for a pronoun because it was originally used to point to an object (guy, etc.).
I hope this makes more sense to you than it does to me. Language, it ain’t easy, homes.
Makes plenty sense to me, descamisado, and I’d be surprised if that’s not just the way it came to be. Slang has weird routes into common usage. It might be fun to trace the real paths that other Spanish words have traveled into the English usages they now have.
I must have heard 20 versions of gringo with “Green Grow The Lilacs” being among them.
I’ve lived in Oh, TN and AZ and traveled to 42 states total. While I’ve certainly not heard the term in every locale I’ve visited, I’ve never once heard heard it pronounced to rhyme with “look”. Interesting.
Plenty of people in Miss. say “nuther” but I don’t think it means “new other”. It’s just a corruption of “other”. (Another one I’ve heard all my life).
FallenAngel: Ever been to Memphis? You can hear it there.
Yep, I’m a Mississippian, too and this definitely refers to “other” as in
“I’m as full as a tick but I just gotta have a nuther one of them cookies.”
I have a question for you other Southerners. How are you perceived outside of your Southern environment? ie: while traveling or while living in another state.
I’ve lived in several different states in the Northeast and on the West Coast. I think I’m relatively intelligent, college educated and can participate knowledgeably on most topics of conversation . I dress well, am well groomed. and have all my teeth. With that said, on several occasions I’ve encountered people that ASSume that I’m IQ challenged because of my Southern accent and/or I’m from Mississippi. I’m extremely careful not to use too many Southerisms in conversation when first meeting people and I have a good grasp of the English language.
For instance, on one occasion I was in the company of several couples. One man was a dentist, another a successful business owner. Everyone was playing a game of “can you name the movie that this quote is from”. I successfully named several before anyone else could. The dentist guy kept giving me lingering, puzzled looks. After a while the dentist said, in all seriousness “You’ve surprised me. You’re pretty smart for a girl from Mississippi!” Then his face turned beet red because he and everyone else realized that he was totally serious. I laughed and then said “Gee, thanks!” Then he apologized for his comment.
I realize most of these things are said in jest and I’ve never gotten angry about it but became very curious as to why I was being “teased” in this way by so many different people in so many different situations. I’ve heard quite a few of these comments over the years such as “We didn’t know people from the South went to college.” etc., etc. I asked a few people what they really thought. They said that the Southern accent can make people sound unintelligent. :eek: When I asked again why, they just said they didn’t really know except for maybe how southern sounding people are portrayed on TV and in movies.
Same here. Until/unless the comments get nasty, I can allow those prejudices to stand. I see them as proof of Yankee ignorance and try to let the little minds relish their alleged superiority.
A phrase older people used when I was a kid- I think it’s more “old timey” than Southern- grass widow. It meant a woman whose husband had “runt off”. Sometimes used for a divorcee as well, but usually for a woman who was technically still married but her husband was AWOL.
I grew up in NW Ohio, but my mom was from SW Tenn and my dad was from rural Ind.; so my accent was pretty Southernized, particularly compared to the rest of the Midwest flat speech I was surrounded by.
I took A LOT of crap for that growing up, and I consciously worked to suppress my accent, figuring there was no way I was going to get ahead in any kind of professional endeavor anywhere else in the country.
I regret it now, but I masked it well enough that the only times my “natural” accent really comes out now is when I’m drunk, tired or angry.
Since I can turn my south Texas accent on or off, it hasn’t been a big deal. I’ve found, in fact, that there are times when it’s a real advantage to slip into syrupy “oh, hon, that’s no big dee-yul” mode. It worked wonders when I was doing tech support and I got an older person on the line. Most of the time they were confused or anxious, and after a bit, I realized I’d been going into Dear Sweet Southern Girl Talk without even thinking about it because it calmed them down. There’s just something downright hospitable and compassionate when it’s done right. The other benefit is that it slows down my speed of speech, which is a very good thing, as I’ve got ADD and usually talk, well, really fast.
From an 11th generation Appalachian (West Virginia since the Civil War) son of a farmer, I was frequently told by my father that I “ain’t worth owl’s bait”. He always told me that on a farm, nothing was wasted and that every part of an animal that was slaughtered was used for something. Apparently, the least useful part of any animal was poisoned and left out to kill the owls that ate the chickens…
He also used the phrase “well aren’t you living high off the hog” meaning that the upper parts of a hog were more valuable than the lower parts. A farmer only got to eat the more valuable parts of a hog when times were good and they didn’t have to sell the hams, ribs, and bacon (higher parts) to buy seed corn and supplies. They ate the lower parts (pig’s feet, head meat, etc. that couldn’t sold for much at the market. This was said when he thought that I was outliving my means. As in the next thing that he would say “you are heading for a long, cold winter”. Presumably because only the lower parts of the hog were left to eat before new hogs were born in the spring.
When harvesting corn in the fall, he would always set the very best ears aside to be used to seed the farm the next spring (this was prior to hybrid corn that can’t be used for seed). He would say that you NEVER eat the seed corn because you would die from starvation the next year without it.
When things were going well, he would say that he was “living in high cotton” meaning that the crop had grown very high and thus more valuable.
Also, when gambling with friends, they would gamble by betting shots of whiskey (his father spent a few years in jail for getting caught inside the largest corn whiskey still ever confiscated in West Virginia during prohibition. So large that it was kept and displayed in the West Virginia state capitol building for about a decade. When you held an especially valuable hand of card (or were doubling down or deceiving about your hand), he would bet a bottle of rye (whiskey), an especially valuable drink in the Appalachians because apparently, rye was difficult to raise and only a very small portion of your farm was reserved for planting rye to make rye whiskey - the rest was used to plant corn to make corn whiskey. The yield of distilled corn whiskey to distilled rye whiskey was much higher per acre of land and tasted better, thus the value of the bet.
But I’m seeing a few chickens heading this way because “chickens always come home to roost” - an old saying for the more modern “what goes around comes around” and I have to get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow when the roosters crow…
My Eastern KY relatives would say “let’s go over yonder” for “over there”. If you had to travel awhile to get to a place, it was “fur piece (far)”. They might say they were “feelin’ puny” if they didn’t feel too well. “You’ve been fallin’ off” means you’ve lost weight.
I only heard one person use this but I thought it was a funny insult: “She’s ugly enough to scare a ghost up a thorn bush”.
