April 16th, 2007 By Sylvia

Southern Speak

Most people are familiar with the old saw which says England and the United States are two countries separated by a common language. The same truism could apply to the various regions of the United States. If a person never traveled as much as three hundred miles from where he or she was born, the nuances of language might possibly have little personal effect. National television personalities have perfected an accentless kind of generic English, so they are generally understood all over the country with few problems.

But try ordering grits in a restaurant barely north of the Mason-Dixon line or even barely south of it in northern Virginia. My Georgia born and bred father did when he drove an eighteen-wheeler into Yankee country. To England, all 270 million Americans are Yanks, but that’s another story. Dad said each and every time he tried to order grits for his breakfast, he always was presented hash brown potatoes. No server knew what grits were, and Dad didn’t know how to tell them. Everybody in the Deep South knows grits are the only accompaniment suited to a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and biscuits.

When I was transplanted to East Tennessee more years ago than I care to admit, okay, okay, it’s over forty, I discovered first hand how language hinders communication. In Georgia, when Dad ‘carried’ Mom to the grocery, it was understood that he drove her to the store in his car. Not so in Kingsport. I was informed, repeatedly, that the proper word was ‘take’ as in ‘Dad will take Mom to the grocery.’

Apparently these well-meaning people had drifted from their own heritage. While going through some accumulated idea files for columns, I found an article written by former Kingsport Times News city editor Gene Owens on Appalachian dialect, which I’d clipped and saved. He wrote twelve years ago, “…you toted groceries, stove wood and other commodities into the house. But you carried your girlfriend wherever you went.”

Being a bashful little Georgia girl, I never mentioned how odd that strange word Tennessee folks use for an ordinary paper bag sounded to my ears. Poke. When you take a poke at someone’s eye, you’ve probably injured them. How could that possibly translate to being a conveyance for ‘carrying’ things? No one ever explained it to me.

Ah, but sweet tea. At least in the matter of the only civilized drink in this country, East Tennessee and Georgia are one. A Georgia legislator has even introduced a bill making sweet tea the official drink of Georgia. Of course, it’s understood that in both states, a libation of a different sort runs a close second. But the other G.R.I.T.S., or ‘girls raised in the South,’ mostly, stick to that thirst-quenching elixir, sweet tea.

These days the common epithet, redneck, is applied to practitioners of the art of Southern speak. That’s ok, I’ll answer to it. But I draw the line at a truck chassis supported by concrete blocks in my front yard.

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