Please share your old memories of rural and Appalachian words and expressions

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m very proud of my Applachian Heritage.

Link List_of_Appalachian_Americans

Link Appalachian English - Wikipedia

Many Americans share a similar background. It may be a distant connection, for many people. But you would be surprised how much your everyday, unguarded language reveals about your background and family.

Paging my friend @Beckdawrek
I need help representing Arkansas and Tennessee.

Elements of the Applachian Language can be easily found in your or your parents everyday vocabulary.

Here are some examples to get us started.
Please share examples and indicate if it’s from your parents, grandparents, ot even great-grandparents.

FWIW my maternal great-great grandparents moved from the hills of Kentucky. My great-great grandfather was raised on a farm near the Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas border. They lived in a rural area 18 miles from Texarkana.

My father’s family are 5th generation from Louisiana. My family isn’t Cajun. My dad spoke a little French. My Grandad owned a sharecropper farm and did carpentry to earn extra money. Grandad eventually earned and saved enough money to buy his own land. He considered owning land and passing it on the biggest accomplishment of his life.

My Dad was raised working side by side with Cajun and black field-hands. Our family raised sugar cane and cotton. It was back-breaking work. My patriarchal grandparents skin was liver spotted, thick, and leathery from decades of working in the scorching hot, sunny fields of Louisiana.

Examples
I need a new pair of of britches. Walmart has Levis on sale this week.

The county you lived in mattered. It was a part of your identity and your roots.

My grandmother always said she was raised in Hempstead county and married a man from Garland County.

My grandmother’s people are from Hempstead county.

Billy, “hand me a sack for these tomatoes”.

You need a new pair of drawers sweetheart. The elastic band is ruined in that pair. Walmart has 3-pack of Fruit of the Looms on sale for $19.99.

That old heifer down the street called today. She’s angry our dog dug in her yard. I wish she’d bother our other neighbors and leave us alone. Yes, that old biddy is spiteful. I saw her yesterday throwing rocks at George’s children.

This should get us started.
Please share your memories of Applachian Heritage and language.

Thank you and y’all have a blessed day.

2

I tried to blend my own language and influences of college-education with my own heritage.

I’ve always felt like an outsider in my family. I represent the first-generation that attended college.

My dad was the first-generation to graduate high school. A career in the military gave him the opportunity to escape working 12-hour days in July chopping cotton.

I’ve never understood the public’s derision of the descendants of rural and Appalachian heritage.

I have never felt The Beverly Hillbillies is funny. That show is racist and prejudicial towards several generations of people that helped populate the rugged backwoods, till the soil, and establish the farming in this country.

My dad sometimes revisted his childhood roots and wanted a bowl of beans and cornbread for dinner. My grandparents considered that a very good meal.

Hard times meant suppers of collard greens, buttermilk and cornbread. That was all that was available and affordable for them to eat.

I saw my dad’s old military paperwork. His induction physical indicated dad had childhood rickets. A disease caused by childhood malnutrition.

I am so fortunate to live in a comfortable home with central heating. I reheat my chilled coffee in a microwave and let the dog go outside to pee. We’re having hamburgers for lunch. Cooked on the barbecue grill.

Life is good. I’m lucky that my birth wasn’t in the 18th century.

3

Check out the Appalachian Word of the Day.

4

“Until I got to college to learn nucular physics, I woished my face with a woishcloth.”

5

I hope that I used the Appalachian dialect correctly. I’m trying to remember and speak as my maternal great-grandmother spoke.

I’m sure that she’d correct me if she were still alive. I don’t remember even half of the dialect that she spoke.

It is a language. We are descendants of the poor Irish-Scottish and dutch.

Woish cloth that’s Old English
Link
Listen carefully to the UK and US pronunciations. The Southern dialect is linked more closely in the UK pronunciation. It’s changed little over the centuries since immigration.

My grandmother would say get that wash rag from the sink and clean the counter.

Appalachia is divided between hill people and flatlanders.

My heritage is flatlanders. My people spent their days looking at the arse-end of a flatulent mule. Tilling the soul until late evening.

6

At the risk of being hopelessly provincial, how do Yankees do it?

Did anyone ever when you were a kid tell you that “gullible” didn’t appear in the dictionary, and then laugh and laugh when you actually went to go look it up?

When I moved to my current home in Appalachia, and my brother in law told me that the word “bunk” came from my county, I didn’t believe him. I thought he was playing the same kind of joke on me. Turns out he wasn’t.

7

Yankee dogs go outside to urinate. :smiley:

But, they hunker-down and shit in the neighbor’s rose-bushes.

Hmm
I haven’t used hunker-down in decades.
How did that enter into my dialect?

8

I didn’t come from that sort of rural background, but I ran into a lot of them in the military. The one word I remember was “cooter”. We were discussing someone who was a total screwup, and this guy said, with obvious disgust: “Yeah, he’s a real cooter (or possibly gooter).” Having never heard that word, I asked him what it meant. He just shrugged and said “He’s just a cooter, that’s all.”

9

How often do you code-switch in your every day life?

I would never approach an adjunct professor at work and say, “I need a new pair of drawers.”

Likewise at home…
Let’s go shopping, “I need a new pair of underware” would get me odd looks.

Boy, why you putting on airs? You think your shit don’t stink?

I always code-switch in posts at SDMB. Living on the edges of the autisim spectrum makes it even more challenging.

Today, all of of my older family has passed. I live in the modern world and my dialect has changed significantly.

10

There’s a lot of West Virginian people up here in the Akron, Ohio area. Basically once you hit the city going south, everyone has a WV accent.

I helped my ex boyfriend’s aunt move, and she was clearly of Appalachian heritage. She kept talking about the “chester drawers” that needed to be moved and it was a phrase I had never heard before.

11

I’ve always wanted to visit Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia.

It would be interesting to move there for a year and immerse myself in the dialect and region’s customs.

I wouldn’t fit in. They’d quickly recognize me as a Southerner.

There are slightly different heritages and cultural norms.

My family left that region three to four generations ago. My great-grandmother is the closest link to Eastern Kentuckey.

I understand better now why I’ve never felt that I belonged to any one part of my family.

I embody Southern, Appalachian and Louisiana Cajun heritage.

Come by the house! I’ll cook some Boudin and a pot of crawfish Gumbo.

12

I grew up in Fairfax, VA. When I was young, it was the Western edge of Washington, DC’s impact on the area. There was still a working dairy farm in the center of town while I was in high school. Now, you couldn’t tell the place from any other built-up metropolitan suburb.

The next town West was the beginning of Appalachian culture, and the Blue Ridge mountains weren’t much further. In high school, there was an even mix between the children of farmers and the children of diplomats, military leaders and business executives. We all got along fine, even though all of our parents hated when we dated each other.

I made a bird house in eighth grade shop class. When the teacher graded me down he said it was “sigogglin’” and I knew just what he meant.

Anything diagonally across an intersection was “kitty corner.”

We used the word “reckon” a good bit, and I still have to watch out for it in formal situations.

About the worst thing you could call someone was “fakey.” Basically because being “fake” was a lot like being a “liar” but if you called anybody that they would tear the walls out just to see the roof fall on you. Honesty was the most important value in our group. I have since learned that comes from Appalachian culture. (It sure didn’t come from DC!!)

Nobody ever asked for a recipe; they asked if you would show them how you make it. Because just following a recipe wasn’t really knowing how to cook in our world. And a lot of these folks learned to cook from relatives who couldn’t read.

Right about 1980 people started talking about not letting dogs “run loose” during the day. It was a strange thought to a lot of folks, and they considered it cruel to keep a dog “all penned up.” But once route 66 was extended out past us, it seemed obvious that dogs had to be in the house or a fenced yard for safety. I did so miss going out for a run and having random dogs join me for part of the way. They all knew me because I had the local paper route; I delivered the “daily.”

13

A friend is from Zanesville, Ohio and seems pretty Appalachian to me. But he makes fun of people near Athens, Ohio. Or New Straightsville, the home of the Moonshine Festival”. He had a lot of colorful expressions but the only one I can think of right now is, “That man is so dumb he couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel”.

14

I never used these myself (my parents were from central NC), but “worsh” for wash and “code” for cold. As in “I’m fixin’ to go worship the car fore it gets to code.” Is fixin’ to do something just Appalachian, or is it Southern? Both our kids were raised inside the DC Beltway. Our daughter will say she’s fixin’ to do something, but our son doesn’t.

15

Disclaimer: IANA Appalachian

The only definition of “cooter” I know is as a semi-affectionate slang term for a bit of female anatomy. And yes, I first encountered that usage in USAF from somebody from the South. It wasn’t a term my SoCal upbringing gave me.

16

Would you approach an adjunct professor at work and say, “I need a new pair of underwear”? Be ready for a call to HR – or, as we call it ‘round here, “A holler at the cooter fixin”.

17

Especially if they were stained.
:smiley: :smiley:

Referencing my underwear wasn’t a good example of code-speak. LOL

Sometimes old words for technologies persists in language.

People refer to an ice box.

I need a gallon of Coal oil.

It’s not really slang. There was a period of time when an ice box was high tech and valued.

It became obsolete and replaced with refrigerators.

18

Before seeing this thread this morning I had a thought about a becoming-obsolete common turn of phrase.

“I’ve been retired 2 years and change”. The “… and change” is referring to some unstated fractional part of a year by analogy to making change with coins during payment for a purchase.

When nobody under 40 ever uses coins (or currency), will the “… and change” idiom die out? Will any young person who uses it know where it came from?

19

I’m sure you’re right, and it’s mostly quite unconscious. I, for example, grew up with parents from slightly different regions of the UK. Mum from the south, Dad from the north. But we always listened to the BBC when I was growing up, and today I seem to have what is considered a ‘neutral British’ accent. But that in itself carries some connotations: it imples an educated middle class person… which I suppose I am, really….

20

My time studying at college was transformational.

It changed a lot of things in my life and what I considered normal. Many values and situations that we’re taught as acceptable get challenged in our college classes.

I rarely use dialect anymore because the people that understood it are gone.