One that my granny used to use: (Name) raised more hell than three Baptist (but she said Babdist) preachers in a tent."
Oh dear lord, I say that all the time to my 14 year old.
“I was born at night, but it wasn’t yesterday night.” And when I say it my accent comes out strong, so it comes over all “yes-tiddy”. Gah!
Course, I’m more Southern than all y’all, these days!
Mississippi girl, we said the general “Champagne taste and a beer budget.”
“I ain’t got a dog in this fight” meaning I don’t care either way is one I use all the time.
Our yearling calves were sometimes targeted by wild dogs. Could have something to do with that.
Two more:
Happy as a pig in sunshine.
or
Happy as a pig in shit.
(Depending on the company of course.)
With only 48 submissions since '99, your posts are as scarce as hen’s teeth.
You just reminded me that some folks in my family used call a doll, a “doll baby.” In fact, that was one cousin’s husband’s pet name for her.
There’s a fun old movie with Robert Ryan, Buddy Hackett and bunches of others called God’s Little Acre (1958) where Robert Ryan’s character Ty Ty is always saying something about “pluperfect hell.” For the longest I had been hearing others saying what sounded to me like “blue-burning hell” and thought that sounded too weird to be the right expression. Perhaps “blue-belly hell” is a similar Mondegreen?
There’s also the possibility that the screenwriter (Erskine Caldwell) invented his own version of something even more hard to believe or fathom. Or else the original expression was something altogether different and, at the time, made perfect sense. Pluperfect sense?
Mondegreens are perhaps the source of many of these quaint sayings. A guy I used to work with misused one of the stock-in-trade similes for somebody being hard to look at by saying, “She looked like forty miles of bad rhino shit.” Odd as it sounded, I began using that just to be different (around other people than that guy.)
Another one I hear frequently, especially in a group setting when it’s decided to not wait for a tardy member to arrive before beginning the festivities or whatnot (usually said to the tardy party upon their arrival): “We waited for ya like one hound waits for the other.”
One of my high school teachers, when asked if he was serious about something, would answer “Serious as a bee sting and three heart attacks.”
I’ve also heard “Put me in the Sahara and call me a prairie dog.”
I’m a white man, 50 years old, grew up in South Jersey, living in Philly. My experience is that it’s a black thing. I hear some of my black co-workers use this convention. When I was in school, I addressed teachers as “Mr./Mrs./Miss [surname].”
Not sure if it’s a regional thing but the ultimate in “Why do I have to do ___” responses was
“Because I said so and I’m bigger than you are”.
I think it’s a very fair response to kids living in your house.
He’s as independent as a hog on ice.
If that has already been posted, I missed it.
Somebody who’s had a few is “about half-snockered.”
(Not sure if that is particularly a Southernism…)
We’d said someone was drunker than Cooter Brown if they were fully in the bag.
I still refer to a former coworker as Old Boar Tits, and the one we got after her who’s still there as Boar Tits Jr. Sadly, I’m not sure if the new one is quite as useful as the name implies.
One I hear once in a while from an older person is “well, I be go to hell.” It means roughly the same thing as one I tend to use myself, “ain’t that the damnedest thing?”
There’s another one I remember, and I’m not sure if it was specific to a family I knew or not: spunsta. As in, I can’t play 'cause I’m spunsta go to the dentist’s in a half-hour. I’ve never heard anyone else use it, so I suspect that it was a family word.
Louisville’s kinda weird linguistically: we’re too far north to be truly part of the south; too far south and east to be part of the Mid-West; too far west to be part of the Atlantic States/Seaboard. We’re just us.
I’ve heard “doll babies”. Usually the same generation that spoke of “play purties”.
As to the low post count, what can I say? I was raised right (even if most of it didn’t take) and didn’t want y’all to think I was showing out.
Not to quarrel, but my wife (white, 67) still refers to people older than herself (regardless of race), with whom she has shared acquaintance since she was a youngster, as Mrs. Firstname or Miss Firstname so-and-so. Not so much with the Mr. Firstname, but it’s not altogether lacking even there.
I’m not pretending it’s universal in the South, but it’s not just a Black thing either.
My take is that it’s more generational (especially in the South) than racial. People younger than 40 or 50 tend to drop those “terms of respect” when referring to their elders. Ageism brought that on, I believe.
“Bubba doesn’t argue with his wife. He knows which side of the bread the butter’s on.”
I suspect that people who have posted in this thread as well as those who have enjoyed what they’ve read here would enjoy Mountain Talk which I saw just the other day on our local PBS station.
One of the most salient points (as far as this thread goes) to the film is that instead of “regionalisms” in Appalachia (and by extension other remote areas wherever thay may be) we might as well be talking about “communityisms” for certain language oddities like usages and pronunciations.
“Southernisms” may be unique but there’s a good case to be made that they’re more like “ruralisms” all over the USA (and probably other English-speaking areas around the planet). The color of a section of a county (as pointed out in Mountain Talk) in their way of speaking and their terms for things, may differ noticably from other sections of the same county!
The deliberate variations and the pride of ownership of those peculiarities of speech, are symptoms of people wanting some measure of distinction and identity. As homogenation gets foisted on us by mass media and the internet we tend to sound (and maybe even think) alike. Only those who revere the “old ways” take time to post in threads like this. It’s a good thing, as I see it.
I just remembered one my Arkansas grandmother would say a lot. “I’ll swan” as a sign of sudden surprise, like “Well, I’ll be damned.”
I used to hear this came from old-time radio ads for Swan dishwashing liquid, with the announcer saying “I’ll Swan” at the end of extolling the product’s virtues, but I’ve since been told it actually predates that, and the ad people probably coopted it for their use.