And I suppose JFK was from the south, since he made them get the missiles out of Cuber?
There are areas of the south where this is true, but don’t assume that all southerners have the same accent.
Imported from Virginia to Dallas, Georgia by one of my co-workers: “Well, Laws’!”. She has no idea what it means, just says it enough to get on my last nerve!
> *Quasi, I’ve always understood “Laws!” or “Lawsy” or “Lawsy mercy!” to be ways to avoid taking the Lord’s name in vain.<
Kinda like “Lordy”, huh? I always wondered how the deity felt about that one.
Here, they’re just ‘boggans.’ As in ‘Lookit my new boggan!’ It took me five minutes to figure out what the hell a toque was supposed to be the first time I saw one mentioned…in a ‘Yankee’ newspaper article, I believe. Then I saw a picture and it all made sense. It’s a Canadian boggan.
I’m also in the middle of a protracted argument with a friend from California as to whether or not a (to)boggan can be a hat. She says Webster’s only has it as a sled. I say Webster’s also says ain’t ain’t a word. Silly Webster’s.
I’m from the 'lanta suburbs, but too much TV and too much living in the SF Bay area have leeched most of my accent away, dammit. (And started that weird mongrel thing somebody else was mentioning – I’ll find myself saying “Dude, y’all!” and “Sheeit, that was RAD.”) So most people don’t know I’m southern until I use one of those key words that I just can’t (pronounced “cain’t”) pronounce Californian:
“oil” (pronounced like it’s spelt: “oh - il”, two syllables)
“want” (“won’t”)
“on” (“own”)
“pen” (“pin”)
“ruin” (can’t really spell it; rhymes with “learn”)
“all of you” (“y’all”)
“dog” (somewhere between “dawg” and “dog”)
so when one of those pops in people accuse me of trying to fake the accent. It also comes back powerful strong when I’m saying strings of numbers, e.g. my zip code is nine-four-fahv-nahn-sayvun.
Expressions, not sure how many of these are really southern: “may can” and “might could”, “fixin’ to”, “can’t never could”, “'bout damn time”, “lie like a dog”, and “goin’ a-beggin’” (as in, “Y’all sure you don’t won’t none of these black-eyed peas? They’re goin’ a-beggin’”)
I’ve spent 25 of my 31 years in Georgia, Tennessee, and Northern Florida (Jacksonville), and a bunch of these are new on me. What on earth is “tump over”? And the first time I heard someone use “toboggan” to describe a hat was when I lived in Iowa (though the speaker was Tennessean).
Anyway, one of my favorites is “that dog’ll hunt”:
“Hey, bubba, check out my new deep-fryer! It’ll flash-fry a turkey in 15 seconds!”