My great uncle Howards name was pronounced like “hired” but with the I replaced with a flat A like in “gas.” He would chop farwood in the fall or use some warplars for electrical work. I don’t know how much of the accent was Appalachian versus being very rural or just southern in general.
I’m from northwestern South Carolina, the area called the piedmont (which is foriegn for “foothills”) so probably at least Appalachian-adjacent culturally. Some of the terms used here I recognize. One I haven’t seen yet is a word that my grandmother used for a type of granulated fertilizer that she put around plants. Pronounced something like “due-anner”. I have no idea how that is spelled and what it is called now, but I know I haven’t heard or seen the word since the 1980s.
A lot of the phrases and linguistic expression that persist in the Appalachians (and, some say, the accent as well) trace back to immigrants from Scotland and England who settled in the south in areas that did not get homogenized later the way most places did. The music of Appalachia has a lot of legacy DNA that ties it to folk songs of Scottish and Irish and English tradition.
“Hunker down” originally meant “just getting low.” “Hunker” just means “squat.” I think as a result of its common use during the press briefings of the (first) Gulf War by military officials referring to the Iraqi troops taking cover during attacks, the common meaning gradually *evolved to mean “take refuge during a critical situation until the coast is clear,” (e.g., hurricanes, snowstorms, pandemic, zombie apocalypse). That’s the sense that seems to be more common now compared to the original.
*Maybe it was already common military usage to ‘take cover,’ but that doesn’t seem to have attained common currency until after the Gulf War. Also, in the 1980s, Larry Munson used it for the Georgia Bulldogs in the sense of “dig in and fight.”
When I was growing up, the dictionaries said “ancient” should be pronounced like “ainshent”. That’s still the first pronunciation listed in many dictionaries, but at least our version is often listed as well.
This looks like one of those oddities where dictionary editors used their ‘preferred’ pronunciation without regard to popular usage. I don’t think I’ve ever heard ‘ancient’ pronounced the 'old school ’ way, but I’ll be listening for it now. Another example is ‘plantain,’ which for many years was shown to be “plan-t’n.” Sure there are many others.
I’m fairly certain my daughter hasn’t initiated a voice call in some years. And she will say “end the call” rather than hang up when she receives a voice call. She also “answers a call” rather than “picking it up”. The language is changing. I suspect her children will not recognize these terms which we think are so entrenched.
I can remember settin’ in a cheer. My parents being from Central North Carolina kept me from picking up a lot of hillbilly dialect. Here’s some genuine hillbilly dialect, from local East Tennessee pro wrasslin’ legend Ron Wright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho5tRMgmLz8
Since we’ve already drifted from the Appalachians into the Ozarks, I’ll add my two cents. We warsh ourselves, and we put the clothes in a warshin machine. Now this can get tricky, because in the Ozarks mountains “warsh” is pronounced like “far”, but in the Mississippi Valley, it’s pronounced like “wore.”
As for sayings and phrases, despite my mother growing up in the Ozarks and my grandparents living there all their lives, I don’t remember much. I remember my grandparents had a small, sheltered space underneath a rock overhang where my grandmother stored the preserves she “put up.” She called it the “root cellar.” When tornadoes threatened, they’d go there because their house had neither a basement nor a “fraidy hole” to take cover.
I won’t even get into the debate between “Missouri” and “Missouruh.”