I'm always bothered by the new speech and words, especially by the way the gay mafia "steals" good words and re-purposes them. But Shands' book shows how frequently evolving and changing colorful speech is throughout history. Shands' book must be wonderful.
These are great sayings. What are your favorite old-time colloquialisms and sayings?
The only one I’ve heard in Mississippi was lickskillet. But add to that “I might could...” (I might) and “Cut the air on.” (Turn the air conditioner on)
How much Water is wasted washing Garbage so greens can call it Recycling ?
“He ain’t worth a lick...”
“He ain’t worth spit...”
I’ve worked on, and off in MS over the last 7 years.
One on one conversation is pretty straightforward. Get ‘em in a group, and this Northerner might well be on another planet. 😉
Good Folks.👍
Having a daughter that is a linguistics nerd and sending her to college in MS has been a great learning experience for our whole family. Aside from expressions, pronunciations also had some surprises.
Our son, who followed our daughter to MSU, found out that his name had two different Southern pronunciations.
Standard American: Ben
Southern: either Bin (like trash bin), or BEYenn (two syllables).
Sorry no great expressions are coming to mind right now.
“That’s a pretty good spit” means a long travel.
“Bless its heart”
“God love it”
My wife’s from North Carolina, not Mississippi, but I’ve heard her refer to a manual transmission as a straight drive, and some of her older relatives still call an accelerator pedal a foot feed.
It’s funny to hear her accent come out as she talks to her mother on the phone. It’ll last for a day or two.
ping
Cajun Louisiana instead of Mississippi, but “Make Groceries” -going to the store to shop for groceries. Just looked it up and apparently it’s from the French “faire son marché”.
A couple from Mississippi from years back:
“Poke” for “sack” or “bag.”
“Mess” for usable quantity of something to eat. For example, “You picked enough collards to make a mess,” or, “We’ve shot our mess of squirrels for dinner, time to go to the house.”
There is a clear distinction amongst southerners from Amarillo to Wilmington and Lexington to Everglades City insofar as dialects and vernacular
Mid south versus Deep South
Appalachian versus Country versus southern accents
I can tell Deep South educated class drawl instantly versus mid south of the same class
Country accent is similar all over here
Texas has a more teeth together country sound except in the park cities or Alamo heights etc
I like how Johnny Depp, in his more verbose roles, gets away with ad-libbing over written script because his contributions are just better. Like in Pirates: At World’s End his men captured Will Turner and he said “”Send this pestilent, traitorous, cow-hearted, yeasty codpiece to the brig.”, perfectly illustrating my English teacher’s admonition that the English language is too rich with appropriate insults to lazily rely on cursing.