December 11, 2024 • 48 mins
Class is in session as Clay Newcomb invites guest lecturer Dr. Brooks Blevins as he explores American dialects with a focus on the southern highland or "Hillbilly" dialect of the Ozark and Appalachian regions. As the class attempts to understand the content, some students just don't get it, while others are clearly "teacher's pets". Prepare to be entertained as you listen along and get your own education about this beloved region of America on this episode of The Bear Grease Podcast.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Good morning, students. My name is Professor Nucleman.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
This is Bear Grease one O one where we study
thanks for gotten but relevant and look for insight and
unlikely places. I'm so glad that you're here on this
Chili December morning. Yeah, hey, will you stop doing that?
Quit throwing stuff?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Today we're going to do things a little bit different
than usual. We have a very distinguished guest lecture today
here by the name of doctor Brooks Blevins, an insightful man,
and he'll be talking to us about regional dialects and language,
but specifically our most treasured and most significant dialect in America,
(00:53):
the Hillbilly dialect of the Ozarks and Appalachian regions. But
we're gonna use this class period as a celebration of
all of America's varied and wonderful dialects. So remember this
is a celebration of regional dialects. If you will, are
there any questions before we get started?
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Excuse me, Professor nukelemb I just wanted to know. Will
we have an opportunity to talk about the regional dialects
of where we're from as well?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yes, yes, you will be able to give examples of
dialects of where you're from, So be thinking and paying attention.
My name is Clay nukelemb and this is the Bear
Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
(01:47):
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Presented by FHF gear, American Aid purpose built hunting and
fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the
place as we explore much. Okay, students, let's pipe down
(02:26):
as we begin our journey into the wonder of regional dialects.
We're all so different and so unique in so many ways.
Let's listen to doctor Blevens. You know, he's written like
fifteen books on the history of the Ozarks.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Very interesting man.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Remember we'll be using the Ozark and Appalachian dialects, but
really we're gonna see how regional dialects apply all over
the United States. Here's doctor Blevins, and he'll be jumping
right in, I mean, like fast.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Let me let me start out by saying, we all
have a dialect. You may, you may. You probably only
recognize it from other people because most people think, well,
I talk, I talk normal, and everybody else is a
little a little crazy. But every language on earth that
there are enough speakers in that language, you have dialects,
and it's just a form of a language that is
(03:24):
specific to a particular region or a particular group of
speakers within that language. And you know, you could have
ethnic dialects. In our case, you're talking about regional dialects.
And around the United States, it's a big place, and
we have regional dialects. They're probably not as not as
pronounced today as they once were because we all watch
(03:47):
the same TV and listen. We've been listening to the
same radio for one hundred years, and we got the
same Internet, and so there's a lot of these homogenizing
influences that sort of erode the corners the sharp edges
of our dialects and make us speak more like each other.
But a lot of linguists will will argue that the
(04:08):
dialects aren't going away. They you know, they might be.
They might seem like it, and they may we may
start to talk more and more like somebody on the
six o'clock news. But uh, you know, I've heard arguments
that that dialects are they're they're with us, and they'll
stay with us. They'll just change like language does over
the years. But that's but so I got interested in this.
(04:30):
And it's really what you might call an Upland South
dialect or a hillbilly dialect, whatever you want to call it.
It's a dialect that that people and a lot of
Appalachia would have, and a lot of the Upper South
and the Ozarks and even parts of Texas and Oklahoma
and stuff like that, and just one of many dialects
around the country. But but it would sound pretty pretty similar.
(04:53):
And we can trace a lot of these influences back
to English settlers from centuries ago, to the people that
we call the Scots, Irish people from Ulster, northern Ireland,
who came over in the seventeen hundreds, and a lot
of their language patterns and eccentricities have survived into the
(05:14):
modern day. We can even go all the way back
to the Vikings. And that's always you know, everybody likes
talking about Vikings, I guess, and you can because a
lot of people don't realize is that, you know, any
language is organic and it's always evolving and stuff like that.
But if you look back at beginning of the late
(05:35):
seven hundreds and continuing into the ten hundreds, there were
these periodic Viking invasions and settlements and stuff in the
British Isles, and even their language seeped its way into
English over time, and a lot of the weird words
that have survived, and you know, if you want to
(05:56):
call it hillbilly dialect or up in the South dialect whatever, uh,
we can even trace back to to to old Norse
or or Viking words. But one of the things that
that I've noticed over the years is and pretty much
everybody in the United States notices this, that there are
(06:17):
certain dialects that we associate with intelligence, and certain that
certain dialects that we don't. And the dialect that I
grew up with here in the Ozarks is one of
those that we don't necessarily associate with with great intelligence.
It's it kind of falls into that greater Southern dialect thing,
(06:38):
where you know, people from other parts of the country
hear you and often just jump to the assumption that
and this, you know, this person is uneducated or maybe
they don't know that much. And and so what what
a lot of us end up doing is when we
go off to college or we start a career or something,
we've become very self concent about the way we sound,
(07:02):
and we start working on our own dialect to be
to kind of tamp it down and to sound more
like everybody else. And I'm pretty sure I've done that
to some degree in my life. I know I did
it a lot earlier. You know, you can form a
little bit dialectically and try to sound like other people.
But what often happens is once you get more comfortable
(07:26):
in your career, once you've achieved something or another, once
you don't have to worry about seeming to be stupid
to somebody else, that who's whose opinion you value. I
find that a lot of people are are then more
comfortable to kind of slip back into that dialect and
sort of pick it up and maybe value it more.
(07:49):
Maybe think of the way your your grandparents, your your
elders said certain words or the way they phrase things,
and there's a certain pride in that and a certain
value that you don't want to let go of. And
so so I think a lot of people, uh are
probably like me, and they and they feel, you know,
(08:10):
more confident, and in talking that way, there's there's certain
there's certain code words that linguists would tell you, like
the word own O N which I which I pronounce
own with a with a long oh. That's one of
the first ones I think that you would if you
were trying to lose your southern accent or your hillbilly
(08:31):
accent or whatever, you know, you would you would switch
that to on. There are various ways that you can
say the word O N. And sometimes that's a that's
kind of an indicator to other people of where you're
from or where you're trying to sound like you're you're from.
And and I've heard people say, well, that's you know,
I started saying on when I was in grad school
(08:54):
or med school or whatever and instead of own, because
that's you know, that's one of those kind of trigger
words that people. We turn a lot of short vowel
sounds into long vowel sounds. And it's the same way
if if you ever watched Andy Griffith show, Uh Andy's
uh has ain't be. It's not it's not aunt b
(09:15):
or aunt be in Mayberry, it's ain't b. And when
I grew up, it was always ain't so, and so
it was you know, you didn't. You didn't say aunt
uh it was it was ain't. That's another one of
those examples of a of a word that we've taken
what would normally be in standard English a short vowel
sound and turned it into a long vow sound.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Okay, students, that was downright fascinating. I know, for instance, me,
I used to have a much thicker accent before I
began my distinguished career here at Cornell University in New York,
where I have been surrounded by the greatest minds in America,
including Andy Bernard, who now lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He's
in the paper business, and Boone biographer Robert Morgan, dear
(10:04):
friend of mine. I know over the years my language
has been honed like a bowie knife on Arkansas whetstone,
polished like a slick rock on the outside bend of
the Caddo River. Now, I'd like to take some questions
from the class. Have you recognized a regional dialect where
you live that you'd like to discuss?
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Yes, young man, with your hand up.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
My name is Josh and my family is from northern Michigan.
And a couple of things that I've noticed about the
way that they speak is anytime they use a word
that has a short o sound, that short o sound
comes from not the back of the throat, but more
from the nasal passages. For instance, my grandfather when he
(10:49):
would go cut firewood, he would say that he wanted
logs cut twenty four inches. So I've noticed that. Another
thing is that there's a few slang words that they
would also use as well. For instance, if something was
notable or caught your attention, you'd say op op, and
then might you might follow that up with oh, look
(11:11):
it over there, not look at it, but actually look it.
Are those the kind of regional dialect idiosyncrasies that you're
talking about, Professor Nukem.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Hmmm, that's that's interesting, very interesting. But no, no, man,
that that's just hogwash. You're gonna need to wash your
mouth out with bear grease Lys soap on that one.
Speaker 5 (11:34):
Son.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
But let's get back to doctor Blevin's and remember we'll
be taking more questions later, so we'll get back to
the rest of the class. Doctor Blevin's gone.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
Any dialect consists of three parts. There's accent, that's how
you pronounce words, how you sound. That's the first thing
that we noticed when they come into contact with anybody
is their their accent, and some of those are more
pronounced than others. So that's one part how how you
sound when you talk. Then there's what we call the
(12:06):
lexicon or vocabulary, and this is most dialects will have
certain words or phrases, especially certain words that you might
not hear in standard English. And we've certainly got some
of those words here in the Ozarks and an Appalachia
in the South and that that you would probably not
(12:28):
here in New York or California or or somewhere like that,
but are are still kind of standard words in our language.
And again, any any regional dialect is going to have
their their own little lexicon. It's not going to be extensive,
but there are going to be unusual words. And then
the last one, the one that's not the funnest one
(12:50):
to talk about, but it's one that that linguists say
is the one that that holds on the longest, is grammar.
Every dialect has these peculiar grammatical features, uh, and usually
that's a code word for bad grammar. Peculiar grammatical features
just means people who use bad grammar, but it's bad
grammar that is, uh, that can be standard to a
(13:14):
certain place. So if I say, if I'm talking about
my garden and say what my peas growed great last year,
our house got a gas leak and load up, you
know that that kind of thing. In other words, bad grammar,
bad subject predicate, you know, linking up there.
Speaker 5 (13:32):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
And there are there are plenty of those in in
the dialect of the of the South and the hillbilly
dialect in general. My kids have always had great fun
(13:55):
making fun of me because I talk. I tend to
talk one way at home, and you know, I've slipped
very easily back into israc County ease when when I'm
at home. But they will hear me like giving a
speech or something at a at a college and and uh,
and that's my that's my smart voice, you know that.
And they like making fun of me over using my
(14:16):
smart voice. But I've tried, I've tried not to make
those so starkly, you know, separate from each other. But
it's it's sometimes, it's sometimes again, it's just kind of
that that process of code switching where where you slip
into comfortable speech when you're at home, whether it's bad
grammar or using unusual words that most people don't know.
(14:40):
When I was a kid growing up here on the farm,
I don't know that my grandparents ever use the word
sack or bag. It was always a poke, you know,
put that in a poke or carry that over, you know,
go grab that potent and fill it up. Like a
lot of words, we can trace, you know, the origins
that word back, and we know it. You know, it
entered English probably through Norman French poque, which was a
(15:06):
word for pouch or pocket, and then of course the
Normans were if you trace them back far enough, they
were Vikings at some point, and even in Old Icelandic
into the early twentieth century, if you had been in
an Iceland at that time, again a kind of a
descendant of a Viking language, if you carried something in
(15:30):
a sack or a bag, it was a pokey, and
so our poke and the the Icelandic people's pokey came
from the same root word. And so it's probably just
an old Viking word that survived in this one place
in the in the United States, where it died out
(15:50):
in most other places. But that's a word that you
could you could still hear in the rural Ozarks and
rural Appalachia today. You're probably not going to hear it
all that often, But a paper poke.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Okay, class, that was an invigorating exploration of oratory energy
by doctor Blevins. You know they say he wants lectured
a summertime bear gorge and on blackberries right into his
winter den. The sucker went to sleep right there in
the spring. Can you imagine doctor Blevins's grandparents.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Calling a sack of poke? That is hilarious?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Does any one of you have an example of a
word or phrase or thing that maybe your grandparents said,
or just people in your areas said that might be
kind of old timmy or regional?
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Anybody? Yes, yes, you young.
Speaker 6 (16:46):
Man Chester Floyd from central eastern Wisconsin. Kind over by
fond Laccari, you know Leakeuinnebagol. Anyways, Uh, you know people
always see there like look over there, But in Wisconsin
we said deer, like, hey, look out the window, there's
(17:07):
some deer over there. Is that kind of what you're
talking about?
Speaker 7 (17:12):
Well?
Speaker 2 (17:15):
No, that was ridiculous and a butchery of a beautiful
language that took thousands of years to develop. Man has
sculpted the English language like a glacier carving out a valley,
and what you just said was more like the work
of a cat five bulldozer with a Marlborough red hanging
out of the driver's mouth. Son, Thank you for sharing
(17:36):
about Wisconsin.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
But let's get back to doctor Blevin's Okay.
Speaker 4 (17:41):
There are a handful of things that help dialect survive
in certain places where it might die out in other place,
or at least, you know, strong dialect survive. One of
those is being in a rural place. And so you know,
we got that covered in most places like where we
are now, and in a lot of places where if
(18:03):
you're in a rural area, dialect is more likely to
you know, a strong dialect is more likely to survive
if you're in a place that has a low formal
educational attainment level, so where people, you know, we're less
likely to have gone to college than in other places.
That's another thing that ensures that these regional dialects or
(18:25):
ethnic dialects or whatever they are, they will survive more
into the future. And then the third one is poverty,
and of course these all often work in tandem. Low education, poverty,
rural areas, and that's why if you go looking for
a hillbilly dialect or any sort of strong regional dialect.
(18:48):
You're more likely to find that in a place that
has at least a couple of these factors working in
his favor. And you're especially likely to find it if
you've got all three of them where. But one of
the things I like to do when I when I'm
talking about dialect is I'll I'll put up words on
a screen. I'll ask people how they pronounce them and uh,
(19:12):
and then you know, we'll see how you pronounce it
in the Ozarks or Appalachia or something like that. And
and another one was the word uh directly. When I
was in high school or even in college, if you'd
asked me to spell the word that I said directly,
I guess I would have spelled it d R E
c k l Y. But it's it's actually directly. So
(19:35):
if you tell somebody I'll be over there directly, it's
you know, basically, you're saying I'll be over there whenever
I get ready to. That's one of the things about
a lot of regional dialects is they tend to be
efficient and economic. You often cut out a syllable or
two in the process of saying things, and it just
(19:55):
you know, it makes it quicker and easier to say
all bowl. You know, you don't say boil and oil.
That's too much trouble. Why would you go through all
that trouble to say extra syllables. So there's a lot
of that.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Doctor Blevins. I'd just like to interrupt for a second.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Here at Cornell University, our student body is the elite
of America. You know, these children's parents are doctors and
lawyers and people involved in the tech industry, big oil
and gas. You know. You referencing poverty and rural life
and low education would be things these students would have
just seen in movies. But I'd like to take another
(20:36):
question from the class. Though, we're focusing on what some
might call the hillbilly dialect. Remember we're celebrating all of
America's unique dialects.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Who has a question, just raise.
Speaker 4 (20:49):
Your hand, professor.
Speaker 5 (20:51):
Professor Professor nukeom Malachi here from Midland, Texas. The things
that I would have heard is show enough. My grandmother
used to always say show enough baby. That means for real,
are you for real the story you're telling me? Show
enough baby. The second thing I would have heard is overchair,
but passing them things overchair, that means over there, passing
(21:15):
those things over there. And then the last thing is
over yonder, over yonder. That means way over there, over yonder.
That's that's what you're looking for, right, that's what you
that's what you're looking for.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Hmmm, Texas.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Uh huh, that's that's that's interesting and a very compelling story.
But no, Nope, that's not really even what we're talking about.
I'd say that's taking a lot of creative liberty with
the English language, young man. Uh but but thank you,
uh doctr Blevin's.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Just carry on.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
When I'm talking to people about about dialect, one of
the things I often do is I'll have what I
call the steps to speaking ozark or speaking hillbilly or whatever.
And one of the steps I tell people, you know,
one of the basic ones is changing the us sound
at the end of words to an ease sound. So,
(22:15):
for instance, in my garden out here, one of my
favorite things to eat out of the garden is okra,
And of course most of the English speaking world would
call that okra, but it's it's an old tradition and
linguists date that style of speaking, of changing that US
sound to an E sound on the end of words,
all the way back to colonial America. They really don't
(22:36):
know exactly where where this originates and why, but it
apparently was kind of a fad in colonial America, maybe
to differentiate American English from British English. I'm not really
sure what was going on, but apparently a lot of people,
you know, started talking that way, and it died out
in most other places in the country, but it survived
(22:59):
actually in places like Appalachia and the Ozarks and these
kind of rural, somewhat isolated places, and still does today.
So there's, you know, there's all kinds of instances in
which we take what ling was called the schwa, which
is the US sound on the end of a word,
and just turned it into an e sound. So you
(23:20):
got a Oakrey got the grand O Opry, that's where
that comes from. There's all kinds of women's names that
ended A, and when I was a kid, most of them,
so he got ain't Brthy instead of Bertha, and Marthy
instead of Martha. And there's My grandma was Alberta. But
(23:43):
if anybody ever called her at Alberta, you knew they
were from off they weren't, you know, they weren't from
around here, because she was always Alberti to everybody who
knew her well, and almost every woman whose name ended
with an a was that way, and some men. There
aren't as many men names that end in that chuaw sound.
But I can remember my grandpa talking about his uncle Noe,
(24:07):
and that was Noah like Noah's Arc, but in the
Hill country it was Noe. And you can even if
your name was Ira, I r A. Now that one
changes on the front end and the back end, so
it doesn't become necessarily Iri. It does become e on
the end of it. But another one of those, and
(24:29):
this is more of a Southern pronunciation, tick, is turning
that eye on the front into a kind of an
owe sound. So you got instead of Ira, you've got Ari.
And that's the same that's the same rule that gives
us tar instead of tire, far instead of fire, war
instead of wire. You know, you arn your clothes instead
(24:52):
of iron them. And one of my favorite stories relating
to changing that long eye sound into kind of an
awe sound when I was when I was a senior
in college, we had a little Quizbo tournament, and our
the dean of our faculty, who was from Massachusetts, was
(25:14):
the one who was reading the questions. He was out
Alex Trebek and I don't remember what the question was,
but the answer to this particular question was the comedian
Richard Pryor. And my my roommate, whose smartest guy I've
ever known. You know, he grew up on a farm
outside of Mamma Spring, Arkansas and very much had that
(25:35):
you know, kind of hill country accent thing going on.
And he buzzed in and uh and the dean called
on him, and my roommate said, Richard PRR. And the
dean just got this funny look on his face, like,
what in the world did that? Did that kid just say?
And uh? And we finally, you know, sort of straightened
it out. And that's you know, that's how we say,
that's how we say Prior is pror. And he believed
(25:58):
us because we were, you know, we were telling the truth.
But it was you know, it's one of those one
of those pronunciation ticks that's you know, different from a
lot of other parts of the country, and that one
is probably more of kind of a Southern thing in
general than it is just a just a hillbilly thing.
So if you ever hear somebody talk about a disaster
(26:20):
being a tarfhar instead of a tarfire, then you know
you're in a certain part of the country and you
have encountered a regional dialect for sure at that point,
because nobody wants to be involved in a tarfhar.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Doctr Blevin, excuse me, Let's take another question from the
class again, looking for regional dialects.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Who has a question?
Speaker 8 (26:47):
Excuse me, professor. My name is Christy and I grew
up in Saint Louis, Missouri, which is in the very
center of the United States. I've been told the people
from the Midwest have the clearest, most approachable, and easily
understood accent and dialect of anyone in the country. Do
(27:09):
you think that's true?
Speaker 7 (27:12):
Hm?
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Okay, okay, thank you.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
I think what you've just done right here, young lady,
is ostracize yourself from this entire class and this entire
country by your hoity toity Saint Louis roots. The Cardinals
have won the World Series like eleven times, but that
doesn't make a Cardinal and American eagle, now, does it.
I think you should check yourself before you wreck yourself,
(27:40):
as some parts of the country say Doctor Blevin's please
just go on, just carry on.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
And another thing that we had our own phrase for
was a jarfly. A jarfly is a cicada. It's the
kind of annual that would come out. I was probably
thirty years old, and I remember because I can remember
listening to a radio show and they were talking about
(28:09):
the cicadas being in full glory, you know, in Washington,
d c. And I remember thinking, well, that would be
I'd like to hear them cicadas. See what's going on
in that very day, I was probably walking through the
woods and being serenaded by jarflies and didn't know that
it was the same thing. But it was about that
time when I figured out that what I called a
(28:31):
jarfly and what most of the people I grew up
with called jarflies, were with the rest of the world
called cicadas. And apparently the reason they were given the
name jarfly by whoever gave them that name and started,
you know, calling them that was not because you catch
them and put them in a jar like you do
lightning bugs. It's because when you get trees full of
(28:52):
those things and they really crank up. It just kind
of jars your you know, just kind of jarsia that
jarsia enters, that sort of sound that they're that they're making.
And so we're all speaking the same language. It's just
these little little peculiarities around the corner of the languages
that that make them a little different. And as I've said,
(29:13):
the Scots Irish had a lot of influence on the
dialect of especially the Upper South, the Appalachia and the Ozarks,
and some of the old words that we can trace
back to our Scotch Irish forebears words like Irish for
cool or nippy. And one of my favorite terms that
(29:35):
that linguists say was brought over by the Scotch Irish,
and you'd probably still hear maybe in some places and
in Scotland, some rural places, is the word ill, not
meaning someone who's sick, but ill meaning someone who's angry,
who's who's upset about something. And because I can remember
my dad pestering my mom about being ill when I
(29:58):
was a kid, and he wasn't talking about her being sick,
he was talking about her being in bad mood. If
you go back and look at the old Norse word,
or the old Viking word iller uh. It's basically means
the same thing. It can be mean or evil or
nasty or something like that. And that word seeped into
into the language and made its way across and a
(30:20):
lot of these our rural terms too, because as I
said it, you know, dialect tends to survive more heartily
in rural areas. So if I talked about a muley cow,
the word muley means no horns, so it would be
a cow with with no horns on it. That's another
one of those that kind of made its way from
(30:43):
Scott's Irish Gaelic, you know, whatever, whatever they were bringing across.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Sorry to interrupt, Dr Blavin, excuse me. I'd like to
take another question from the class. Anyone have a question.
Speaker 7 (30:55):
My name is Brent and I'm from southeast Darkansas. And
before we had supper my grandma's she always told us
to be sure and wrench your hands off, especially if
we've been cleaning. The big old messis squirrels. It was
pretty clear to us, young is that the difference between
Rnch and Rents was cleaner hands? Now, is that what
you're talking about? A professor, young man?
Speaker 1 (31:16):
That was beautiful. That was beautiful. You had a very
special grandmother, didn't you.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Finally, a truly intelligent example of regional dialect. I have
no idea why that woman said ranch instead of rents.
It doesn't even make sense. It's not even connected to
some other country. But it does make some beautiful American
folk poetry. Thank you for your contribution to this class.
(31:46):
Rent it's students like you. I don't want to get
choked up here. It's students like you that make my job,
in doctor Blevin's job so fulfilling.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
This is why we do it. Carry on, Doctor Blevin's
just carry on.
Speaker 4 (32:15):
And then we've got a lot of words in our
lexicon that basically just mean crooked or out of whack,
out of plum, something like that. You've got words like
a anti goglin, which you may have heard, or pygoglin
that means the same thing anti Goglin and sygoglin. There's
caddie wampus. My favorite is wamper jawled. In my family,
(32:39):
it was wamper jawled. I think it's probably more commonly
whopper yawned. And we can trace it back again to
like Middle and maybe even Old English the word whopper
was a verb that meant to oscillate or to move
around erradically. Another fun word and this, I think this
is a pretty common word and has come common in
(33:00):
the last thirty years. Is bumfuzzled? Bum fuzzled? Is it
means to be confused, disoriented, something like that. And it
was almost exactly twenty five years ago. It was in
late October of nineteen ninety nine and Bill Clinton was
president and he used the term bum fuzzled at a
(33:20):
press conference and he was criticizing the Republican's proposed budget
for that year, and he said something like this is
going to bum fuzzle the American people. And the East
coast and West coast press just went crazy over this
word because nobody knew what it meant at that time.
(33:41):
Apparently it wasn't as common as as it is today.
But in Slate magazine had it whole article dedicated to
the president using the word the word bum fuzzled and
a press conference, and they speculated that maybe it's a
code word that you know, he sent and the secret
messages to somebody.
Speaker 5 (34:02):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
But there was all this speculation on what the what
the president was saying with bum fuzzled, and they were.
You know, this is in the very early days of
the of the internet, so it wasn't as easy just
to go, you know, look stuff up as it as
it is today. But i'll just I'll just talk about
a few more of the rules if you want to
(34:22):
talk like a like a backwoodsman or you know, somebody
from Appalachi or the Ozarks. One of the obvious ones
is you take words that end in ow and turn
into er. So you've got o yeller, you've got winder.
You wouldn't have set a menow trap around here, you'd
set a mintor trap. You go, uh, walking through the meta,
(34:45):
you know, good old feller, just any pretty much any
word uh. And I can even remember, you know, the
the soft drink of mellow yellow. I can remember people
calling that mellow yeller when I was the k And
this is one you'll you'll recognize too, if you talk
about using the word one after a nown, like the
(35:09):
big one or the next one or the little one.
It was old Scott's Irish style to just turn it
into un. So you've got young and biggin, little and
next and all those any phrase where you would end
it with one, you just turn it into kind of
a U N and squeeze them together and again, you know,
(35:33):
going back to the Andy Griffith Show, which was one
of the better displays of Upland South dialect that we've
ever had on a you know, on this kind of
national basis, he would usually refer to Opie as a
youngin and not as a as a child or a
kid or anything like that. It was usually a young
(35:55):
and so he had ain't b and he had young
and And my other favorite example of like Hollywood getting
it right for a change is the movie sling Blade.
I remember, I think I teared up two or three
times in that movie. I was so excited. Of course,
Billy Bob Thornton is also from the Upland South more,
(36:17):
you know, the wash it talls kind of the edge
of the wash italls instead of the Ozarks. But we
all pretty much sound the same. We're not that far apart.
And there were a couple that won me over. He
used the term stob and used it correctly. Stob Linguists
will say, that's our word. Stob is just it's descended
(36:39):
from kind of a Scottish pronunciation of the word stub,
kind of what you know, a scot or an Irish
person would sound like if they said stub, it would
sound sort of like stob. Like if you bush hog
a field, you're left with a bunch of little stobs,
a little tiny stumps in sling blade. The little boy
was he had this stub of a stick that he's
(37:01):
warping the ground with. And warping that's another good word.
You know, you've got to if you're hitting something, you're
you're warping it. And and Carl comes up and says,
what are you doing with that stob? And you know,
it was something that most people probably wouldn't pick up
on unless you were from an area where you stob regularly.
(37:22):
And then the other one was at the end where
I won't give away anything for people who haven't watched
the movie, but when Carl picks up the phone and
calls after he's taken care of of Dole instead of Doyle,
you know, he's taking care of Dole and he and
he tells him to bring a hurst, and a hurst
(37:43):
of course, in a lot of rural areas, a hearst
was an ambulance, as we might say, or an ambulance
by putting that tea on the end of that. That
was another one of those things that you often hear
in southern and you know Appalachian and ozark speech. So
(38:03):
you got a it's a hearst instead of a hearse
it's once instead of once, twice instead of twice, give
me a chance instead of chance. And there you're doing
a couple of You're you're turning the short a into
a long a, and you're sticking a T on the
I don't know why why we do that, why we
put a t on on the end of a lot
(38:25):
of words like that, but we do. And that's another
one of those things that that sling Blade got right,
and that's why everybody should watch sling Blade.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Doctor Levin's excuse me again, I'd like to take just
one last question from the students as we celebrate all
of America's regional dialects.
Speaker 9 (38:46):
Anyone, thank you, professor. Yeah, my name is Bear and
I'm from western Arkansas. Uh, my father, grandfather and actually
as far back as we can remember, pronounce the word
spelled a c o r n as akren a corn.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Is that a good example of regional dialect?
Speaker 7 (39:04):
Well?
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Well, well, haven't we saved the best comment for last
young man.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
That was powerful.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Just give me a minute here to myself. That was powerful.
Thank you. Trying not to get emotional, but that was
raw cultural zeitgeist power. Go ahead, doctor Blebans, just carry
on with your final point.
Speaker 4 (39:31):
Thank you. My last rule of how to talk hillbilly
or how to talk oz are it's it's putting an
A on the front of an action verb. And a
linguist called this, if I can get this right, an
archaic intensifying prefix. That's a really fancy way of saying
(39:52):
sticking an A on the front of something just to
just to kind of give it a little umph, you know,
to give it a little more power, which is something
that linguists say was brought over not by the Scott's Irish,
but by settlers from a certain region of England where
that had been common, and it survived in Appalachia and
the Ozarks more than it has anywhere else. But it's
(40:15):
also sometimes called a prefixing. And so I can remember
very vividly from my childhood people talking about, Oh, their
kids are running in a bucking deers are jumping over
the fence. You know, you put that A on the
front of something, and we may think it sounds kind
of crazy and that it only shows up in Billy
(40:37):
Bob Thornton movies. But if you think of if you
think of music, it's in a lot of old songs
that we still have, like the ten Days or the
twelve Days of Christmas, ten lords a leaping, eight maids
of milking, seven swans of swimming, six geese a laying.
As recently as the seventeen hundreds, that would have been
(40:58):
a pretty common thing.
Speaker 6 (41:01):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (41:01):
The old song a hunting we will go if you
remember that one from childhood, hunting we will go, hunting,
we will go. Uh, there's even a segment in there.
Let's see, we'll we'll catch a bear and cut his
hair and then we'll let him go. I don't know
if if bear grease you know, supports that that kind
(41:21):
of treatment of bears, But that that's one that's another
one of those peculiar grammatical features that a lot of times,
if you if you grew up in that dialect, you're
probably using don't even realize you're using it. Yeah, you
see what I did there, and it's you know, I
think it's a it's a good thing to be comfortable
(41:45):
with your dialect to a certain degree, and especially if
you're from south of a certain point in the United States,
you're you sometimes feel kind of shamed into into sloughing
that off and conform in to standard English. But I
don't feel compelled any more to do that. And even
(42:07):
though I'm sure I do a lot of times. You know,
I always tell people just, you know, talk how you
want to talk, and talk how you feel comfortable talking
if you can get away with it. You know, we're
excited about dialects and uniqueness and all that kind of
stuff till it starts costing us money and then it's time,
you know, to talk like the guy on the on
(42:27):
the evening news.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
Doctor Blevin's. That was very informative. I remember that you
had a story about going to church. If you don't
mind go ahead and tell us that story.
Speaker 4 (42:39):
Yeah, this this little church and in the Arkansas Ozarks
that had invited me to come and speak one Sunday morning.
And and I'm not a preacher, and you know, I
wouldn't feel comfortable at all, you know, launching into a
sermon or anything like that, and nobody would, nobody else
would be comfortable if I if I tried to do
(42:59):
that too. So I actually I took the the Adam
and Eve's story from the Bible and I rendered it
in basically in hillbilly language. And I'm not trying to
be irreverent. This is the this is the Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden story. Now, once upon
(43:23):
a time, and that garden of Eden was a snake,
and that snake was as smart as could be. He
sidled up to this little goal and he says, look
at here. There's fruit of hanging everywhere, is off in
the trees and bushes, and this here garden. And you're
a telling me that the Lord said gens can't eat
an every bite of it. No, the gal says, I reckon,
(43:44):
we can eat airy. We want acepting that fruit on
that big and over there right smack dab in the middle.
The old Master said, don't be a messing with that,
don't even touch it. If and we do, we'll surely
pass on. Well, that snake was an andre dickens, just
plum full of devilment. He says, why that ain't right.
You ain't about to die. The Lord don't want you
(44:05):
eating the goodies off that big tree, because when you
do you'll be just as sharp as he is, and
that's the gospel truth, or the Lord can strike me down. Well,
this old gal took a gander of that tree that
she ain't supposed to be nowhere's around, and she got
to study on them how larp and that fruit would be, Oh,
it would be the stewed rosin. So she peeped around
(44:28):
this away in that way, she reached over and snatched
her apple and etter aback. Then she carried some to
a feller, and he had him a little bit of it.
Soon as the both of them had gnawed off a
piece and swallowed it, plumped down their goosele. Well, you
better know something powerful commenced working on their thinking directly.
They come too and figured out they was naked as
(44:50):
a jaybird. So the old gal rustled up a jaggu
leaves off a catoffie tree and hemmed them into something
looked like a big old night shirt. She fixed up
some short riches for the fella. It being right peculiar
for men to sold long about dusky dark, Here come
the Lord of walking through the garden, and they heard
him and pushed up. The lord hollered out, where are you?
(45:13):
The fella hollered back right here. Lord, I heard you coming,
but I got scared and hit out on account of
my nakedness. Well, who in the dickens told you he
is naked? Said the Lord. I swan you's been eating
off that tree. I said to leave bee, ain't you?
Then the fella says, hit was this old gal you
put in here with me? Lord? I know it? She'd
(45:33):
be more trouble than a wild cat in a paper poke.
She brung me something to eat, and I added, seeing
as how I ain't in the habit of fixing my
mowan dinner. So the Lord says to this old gal,
how come you to do such a thing? She says, hit,
was that drotted snake? Why he bumfuzzled me so much?
My mind just clabbered up.
Speaker 5 (45:51):
Now.
Speaker 4 (45:51):
You might think that snake would have tailed it out
of here by now, but he ain't done it. And
you better know the Lord was ill as a hornet. Oh,
he cut his eyes at that snake, and he sure
enough told him how the cow eat the cabbage. Because
of this here mess you made for the rest of
time and creation, You're gonna crawl around down on your
belly all caddywampus in the dirt. You and this here
(46:14):
old gal ain't gonna like each other. A tall fact
of business. Her youngins is gonna stomp on your youngin's heads,
and your youngins is gonna use pis in his teeth
to bite her youngin's heels. Then the Lord gave the
old gal and her feller are talking to like they
ain't never heard. He said to the old gal, you're
gonna get in a family way, and having that young
(46:35):
and will hurt you a right smart and to see
to it that you're told never ceases. You're gonna be
stuck with this here feller, what tattled on you and
what can't cook her soul for the rest of your life.
As for you, Feller, the Lord told him, you aren't
a done what you did just because your wife told
you to. For that, You're gonna spend your life at
(46:55):
digging in this hard, rocky ground just to survive. You'll
have to live all for polke salad and lambs quarters
and squirrel. And when some ever you fix on to
grow in something, you'll be tormented by pigweed and poor
joe and crabgrass and every other infernal weed under the heavens,
your sweat' water the fields, but it's salt will pies
(47:16):
in the ground, and one day, one day, you'll go
back to the dirt what made you, and they ain't
nary a thing you can do about it.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode. I want
to think are distinguished guest lecture Dr Brooks, Blevins and
all of our wonderful students. Sometimes the things that appear
to be differences are actually the things.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
That make us the same.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear, Grease
and Brents this country life podcast.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Please leave us a review on.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
iTunes, Share this episode with somebody this week.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
We hope you have a wonderful Christmas.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
Seasons cheap the wild places wild, so that's where the
bears live.
Good morning, students. My name is Professor Nucleman.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
This is Bear Grease one O one where we study
thanks for gotten but relevant and look for insight and
unlikely places. I'm so glad that you're here on this
Chili December morning. Yeah, hey, will you stop doing that?
Quit throwing stuff?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Today we're going to do things a little bit different
than usual. We have a very distinguished guest lecture today
here by the name of doctor Brooks Blevins, an insightful man,
and he'll be talking to us about regional dialects and language,
but specifically our most treasured and most significant dialect in America,
(00:53):
the Hillbilly dialect of the Ozarks and Appalachian regions. But
we're gonna use this class period as a celebration of
all of America's varied and wonderful dialects. So remember this
is a celebration of regional dialects. If you will, are
there any questions before we get started?
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Excuse me, Professor nukelemb I just wanted to know. Will
we have an opportunity to talk about the regional dialects
of where we're from as well?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yes, yes, you will be able to give examples of
dialects of where you're from, So be thinking and paying attention.
My name is Clay nukelemb and this is the Bear
Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
(01:47):
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Presented by FHF gear, American Aid purpose built hunting and
fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the
place as we explore much. Okay, students, let's pipe down
(02:26):
as we begin our journey into the wonder of regional dialects.
We're all so different and so unique in so many ways.
Let's listen to doctor Blevens. You know, he's written like
fifteen books on the history of the Ozarks.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Very interesting man.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Remember we'll be using the Ozark and Appalachian dialects, but
really we're gonna see how regional dialects apply all over
the United States. Here's doctor Blevins, and he'll be jumping
right in, I mean, like fast.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Let me let me start out by saying, we all
have a dialect. You may, you may. You probably only
recognize it from other people because most people think, well,
I talk, I talk normal, and everybody else is a
little a little crazy. But every language on earth that
there are enough speakers in that language, you have dialects,
and it's just a form of a language that is
(03:24):
specific to a particular region or a particular group of
speakers within that language. And you know, you could have
ethnic dialects. In our case, you're talking about regional dialects.
And around the United States, it's a big place, and
we have regional dialects. They're probably not as not as
pronounced today as they once were because we all watch
(03:47):
the same TV and listen. We've been listening to the
same radio for one hundred years, and we got the
same Internet, and so there's a lot of these homogenizing
influences that sort of erode the corners the sharp edges
of our dialects and make us speak more like each other.
But a lot of linguists will will argue that the
(04:08):
dialects aren't going away. They you know, they might be.
They might seem like it, and they may we may
start to talk more and more like somebody on the
six o'clock news. But uh, you know, I've heard arguments
that that dialects are they're they're with us, and they'll
stay with us. They'll just change like language does over
the years. But that's but so I got interested in this.
(04:30):
And it's really what you might call an Upland South
dialect or a hillbilly dialect, whatever you want to call it.
It's a dialect that that people and a lot of
Appalachia would have, and a lot of the Upper South
and the Ozarks and even parts of Texas and Oklahoma
and stuff like that, and just one of many dialects
around the country. But but it would sound pretty pretty similar.
(04:53):
And we can trace a lot of these influences back
to English settlers from centuries ago, to the people that
we call the Scots, Irish people from Ulster, northern Ireland,
who came over in the seventeen hundreds, and a lot
of their language patterns and eccentricities have survived into the
(05:14):
modern day. We can even go all the way back
to the Vikings. And that's always you know, everybody likes
talking about Vikings, I guess, and you can because a
lot of people don't realize is that, you know, any
language is organic and it's always evolving and stuff like that.
But if you look back at beginning of the late
(05:35):
seven hundreds and continuing into the ten hundreds, there were
these periodic Viking invasions and settlements and stuff in the
British Isles, and even their language seeped its way into
English over time, and a lot of the weird words
that have survived, and you know, if you want to
(05:56):
call it hillbilly dialect or up in the South dialect whatever, uh,
we can even trace back to to to old Norse
or or Viking words. But one of the things that
that I've noticed over the years is and pretty much
everybody in the United States notices this, that there are
(06:17):
certain dialects that we associate with intelligence, and certain that
certain dialects that we don't. And the dialect that I
grew up with here in the Ozarks is one of
those that we don't necessarily associate with with great intelligence.
It's it kind of falls into that greater Southern dialect thing,
(06:38):
where you know, people from other parts of the country
hear you and often just jump to the assumption that
and this, you know, this person is uneducated or maybe
they don't know that much. And and so what what
a lot of us end up doing is when we
go off to college or we start a career or something,
we've become very self concent about the way we sound,
(07:02):
and we start working on our own dialect to be
to kind of tamp it down and to sound more
like everybody else. And I'm pretty sure I've done that
to some degree in my life. I know I did
it a lot earlier. You know, you can form a
little bit dialectically and try to sound like other people.
But what often happens is once you get more comfortable
(07:26):
in your career, once you've achieved something or another, once
you don't have to worry about seeming to be stupid
to somebody else, that who's whose opinion you value. I
find that a lot of people are are then more
comfortable to kind of slip back into that dialect and
sort of pick it up and maybe value it more.
(07:49):
Maybe think of the way your your grandparents, your your
elders said certain words or the way they phrase things,
and there's a certain pride in that and a certain
value that you don't want to let go of. And
so so I think a lot of people, uh are
probably like me, and they and they feel, you know,
(08:10):
more confident, and in talking that way, there's there's certain
there's certain code words that linguists would tell you, like
the word own O N which I which I pronounce
own with a with a long oh. That's one of
the first ones I think that you would if you
were trying to lose your southern accent or your hillbilly
(08:31):
accent or whatever, you know, you would you would switch
that to on. There are various ways that you can
say the word O N. And sometimes that's a that's
kind of an indicator to other people of where you're
from or where you're trying to sound like you're you're from.
And and I've heard people say, well, that's you know,
I started saying on when I was in grad school
(08:54):
or med school or whatever and instead of own, because
that's you know, that's one of those kind of trigger
words that people. We turn a lot of short vowel
sounds into long vowel sounds. And it's the same way
if if you ever watched Andy Griffith show, Uh Andy's
uh has ain't be. It's not it's not aunt b
(09:15):
or aunt be in Mayberry, it's ain't b. And when
I grew up, it was always ain't so, and so
it was you know, you didn't. You didn't say aunt
uh it was it was ain't. That's another one of
those examples of a of a word that we've taken
what would normally be in standard English a short vowel
sound and turned it into a long vow sound.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Okay, students, that was downright fascinating. I know, for instance, me,
I used to have a much thicker accent before I
began my distinguished career here at Cornell University in New York,
where I have been surrounded by the greatest minds in America,
including Andy Bernard, who now lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He's
in the paper business, and Boone biographer Robert Morgan, dear
(10:04):
friend of mine. I know over the years my language
has been honed like a bowie knife on Arkansas whetstone,
polished like a slick rock on the outside bend of
the Caddo River. Now, I'd like to take some questions
from the class. Have you recognized a regional dialect where
you live that you'd like to discuss?
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Yes, young man, with your hand up.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
My name is Josh and my family is from northern Michigan.
And a couple of things that I've noticed about the
way that they speak is anytime they use a word
that has a short o sound, that short o sound
comes from not the back of the throat, but more
from the nasal passages. For instance, my grandfather when he
(10:49):
would go cut firewood, he would say that he wanted
logs cut twenty four inches. So I've noticed that. Another
thing is that there's a few slang words that they
would also use as well. For instance, if something was
notable or caught your attention, you'd say op op, and
then might you might follow that up with oh, look
(11:11):
it over there, not look at it, but actually look it.
Are those the kind of regional dialect idiosyncrasies that you're
talking about, Professor Nukem.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Hmmm, that's that's interesting, very interesting. But no, no, man,
that that's just hogwash. You're gonna need to wash your
mouth out with bear grease Lys soap on that one.
Speaker 5 (11:34):
Son.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
But let's get back to doctor Blevin's and remember we'll
be taking more questions later, so we'll get back to
the rest of the class. Doctor Blevin's gone.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
Any dialect consists of three parts. There's accent, that's how
you pronounce words, how you sound. That's the first thing
that we noticed when they come into contact with anybody
is their their accent, and some of those are more
pronounced than others. So that's one part how how you
sound when you talk. Then there's what we call the
(12:06):
lexicon or vocabulary, and this is most dialects will have
certain words or phrases, especially certain words that you might
not hear in standard English. And we've certainly got some
of those words here in the Ozarks and an Appalachia
in the South and that that you would probably not
(12:28):
here in New York or California or or somewhere like that,
but are are still kind of standard words in our language.
And again, any any regional dialect is going to have
their their own little lexicon. It's not going to be extensive,
but there are going to be unusual words. And then
the last one, the one that's not the funnest one
(12:50):
to talk about, but it's one that that linguists say
is the one that that holds on the longest, is grammar.
Every dialect has these peculiar grammatical features, uh, and usually
that's a code word for bad grammar. Peculiar grammatical features
just means people who use bad grammar, but it's bad
grammar that is, uh, that can be standard to a
(13:14):
certain place. So if I say, if I'm talking about
my garden and say what my peas growed great last year,
our house got a gas leak and load up, you
know that that kind of thing. In other words, bad grammar,
bad subject predicate, you know, linking up there.
Speaker 5 (13:32):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
And there are there are plenty of those in in
the dialect of the of the South and the hillbilly
dialect in general. My kids have always had great fun
(13:55):
making fun of me because I talk. I tend to
talk one way at home, and you know, I've slipped
very easily back into israc County ease when when I'm
at home. But they will hear me like giving a
speech or something at a at a college and and uh,
and that's my that's my smart voice, you know that.
And they like making fun of me over using my
(14:16):
smart voice. But I've tried, I've tried not to make
those so starkly, you know, separate from each other. But
it's it's sometimes, it's sometimes again, it's just kind of
that that process of code switching where where you slip
into comfortable speech when you're at home, whether it's bad
grammar or using unusual words that most people don't know.
(14:40):
When I was a kid growing up here on the farm,
I don't know that my grandparents ever use the word
sack or bag. It was always a poke, you know,
put that in a poke or carry that over, you know,
go grab that potent and fill it up. Like a
lot of words, we can trace, you know, the origins
that word back, and we know it. You know, it
entered English probably through Norman French poque, which was a
(15:06):
word for pouch or pocket, and then of course the
Normans were if you trace them back far enough, they
were Vikings at some point, and even in Old Icelandic
into the early twentieth century, if you had been in
an Iceland at that time, again a kind of a
descendant of a Viking language, if you carried something in
(15:30):
a sack or a bag, it was a pokey, and
so our poke and the the Icelandic people's pokey came
from the same root word. And so it's probably just
an old Viking word that survived in this one place
in the in the United States, where it died out
(15:50):
in most other places. But that's a word that you
could you could still hear in the rural Ozarks and
rural Appalachia today. You're probably not going to hear it
all that often, But a paper poke.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Okay, class, that was an invigorating exploration of oratory energy
by doctor Blevins. You know they say he wants lectured
a summertime bear gorge and on blackberries right into his
winter den. The sucker went to sleep right there in
the spring. Can you imagine doctor Blevins's grandparents.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Calling a sack of poke? That is hilarious?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Does any one of you have an example of a
word or phrase or thing that maybe your grandparents said,
or just people in your areas said that might be
kind of old timmy or regional?
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Anybody? Yes, yes, you young.
Speaker 6 (16:46):
Man Chester Floyd from central eastern Wisconsin. Kind over by
fond Laccari, you know Leakeuinnebagol. Anyways, Uh, you know people
always see there like look over there, But in Wisconsin
we said deer, like, hey, look out the window, there's
(17:07):
some deer over there. Is that kind of what you're
talking about?
Speaker 7 (17:12):
Well?
Speaker 2 (17:15):
No, that was ridiculous and a butchery of a beautiful
language that took thousands of years to develop. Man has
sculpted the English language like a glacier carving out a valley,
and what you just said was more like the work
of a cat five bulldozer with a Marlborough red hanging
out of the driver's mouth. Son, Thank you for sharing
(17:36):
about Wisconsin.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
But let's get back to doctor Blevin's Okay.
Speaker 4 (17:41):
There are a handful of things that help dialect survive
in certain places where it might die out in other place,
or at least, you know, strong dialect survive. One of
those is being in a rural place. And so you know,
we got that covered in most places like where we
are now, and in a lot of places where if
(18:03):
you're in a rural area, dialect is more likely to
you know, a strong dialect is more likely to survive
if you're in a place that has a low formal
educational attainment level, so where people, you know, we're less
likely to have gone to college than in other places.
That's another thing that ensures that these regional dialects or
(18:25):
ethnic dialects or whatever they are, they will survive more
into the future. And then the third one is poverty,
and of course these all often work in tandem. Low education, poverty,
rural areas, and that's why if you go looking for
a hillbilly dialect or any sort of strong regional dialect.
(18:48):
You're more likely to find that in a place that
has at least a couple of these factors working in
his favor. And you're especially likely to find it if
you've got all three of them where. But one of
the things I like to do when I when I'm
talking about dialect is I'll I'll put up words on
a screen. I'll ask people how they pronounce them and uh,
(19:12):
and then you know, we'll see how you pronounce it
in the Ozarks or Appalachia or something like that. And
and another one was the word uh directly. When I
was in high school or even in college, if you'd
asked me to spell the word that I said directly,
I guess I would have spelled it d R E
c k l Y. But it's it's actually directly. So
(19:35):
if you tell somebody I'll be over there directly, it's
you know, basically, you're saying I'll be over there whenever
I get ready to. That's one of the things about
a lot of regional dialects is they tend to be
efficient and economic. You often cut out a syllable or
two in the process of saying things, and it just
(19:55):
you know, it makes it quicker and easier to say
all bowl. You know, you don't say boil and oil.
That's too much trouble. Why would you go through all
that trouble to say extra syllables. So there's a lot
of that.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Doctor Blevins. I'd just like to interrupt for a second.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Here at Cornell University, our student body is the elite
of America. You know, these children's parents are doctors and
lawyers and people involved in the tech industry, big oil
and gas. You know. You referencing poverty and rural life
and low education would be things these students would have
just seen in movies. But I'd like to take another
(20:36):
question from the class. Though, we're focusing on what some
might call the hillbilly dialect. Remember we're celebrating all of
America's unique dialects.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Who has a question, just raise.
Speaker 4 (20:49):
Your hand, professor.
Speaker 5 (20:51):
Professor Professor nukeom Malachi here from Midland, Texas. The things
that I would have heard is show enough. My grandmother
used to always say show enough baby. That means for real,
are you for real the story you're telling me? Show
enough baby. The second thing I would have heard is overchair,
but passing them things overchair, that means over there, passing
(21:15):
those things over there. And then the last thing is
over yonder, over yonder. That means way over there, over yonder.
That's that's what you're looking for, right, that's what you
that's what you're looking for.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Hmmm, Texas.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Uh huh, that's that's that's interesting and a very compelling story.
But no, Nope, that's not really even what we're talking about.
I'd say that's taking a lot of creative liberty with
the English language, young man. Uh but but thank you,
uh doctr Blevin's.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Just carry on.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
When I'm talking to people about about dialect, one of
the things I often do is I'll have what I
call the steps to speaking ozark or speaking hillbilly or whatever.
And one of the steps I tell people, you know,
one of the basic ones is changing the us sound
at the end of words to an ease sound. So,
(22:15):
for instance, in my garden out here, one of my
favorite things to eat out of the garden is okra,
And of course most of the English speaking world would
call that okra, but it's it's an old tradition and
linguists date that style of speaking, of changing that US
sound to an E sound on the end of words,
all the way back to colonial America. They really don't
(22:36):
know exactly where where this originates and why, but it
apparently was kind of a fad in colonial America, maybe
to differentiate American English from British English. I'm not really
sure what was going on, but apparently a lot of people,
you know, started talking that way, and it died out
in most other places in the country, but it survived
(22:59):
actually in places like Appalachia and the Ozarks and these
kind of rural, somewhat isolated places, and still does today.
So there's, you know, there's all kinds of instances in
which we take what ling was called the schwa, which
is the US sound on the end of a word,
and just turned it into an e sound. So you
(23:20):
got a Oakrey got the grand O Opry, that's where
that comes from. There's all kinds of women's names that
ended A, and when I was a kid, most of them,
so he got ain't Brthy instead of Bertha, and Marthy
instead of Martha. And there's My grandma was Alberta. But
(23:43):
if anybody ever called her at Alberta, you knew they
were from off they weren't, you know, they weren't from
around here, because she was always Alberti to everybody who
knew her well, and almost every woman whose name ended
with an a was that way, and some men. There
aren't as many men names that end in that chuaw sound.
But I can remember my grandpa talking about his uncle Noe,
(24:07):
and that was Noah like Noah's Arc, but in the
Hill country it was Noe. And you can even if
your name was Ira, I r A. Now that one
changes on the front end and the back end, so
it doesn't become necessarily Iri. It does become e on
the end of it. But another one of those, and
(24:29):
this is more of a Southern pronunciation, tick, is turning
that eye on the front into a kind of an
owe sound. So you got instead of Ira, you've got Ari.
And that's the same that's the same rule that gives
us tar instead of tire, far instead of fire, war
instead of wire. You know, you arn your clothes instead
(24:52):
of iron them. And one of my favorite stories relating
to changing that long eye sound into kind of an
awe sound when I was when I was a senior
in college, we had a little Quizbo tournament, and our
the dean of our faculty, who was from Massachusetts, was
(25:14):
the one who was reading the questions. He was out
Alex Trebek and I don't remember what the question was,
but the answer to this particular question was the comedian
Richard Pryor. And my my roommate, whose smartest guy I've
ever known. You know, he grew up on a farm
outside of Mamma Spring, Arkansas and very much had that
(25:35):
you know, kind of hill country accent thing going on.
And he buzzed in and uh and the dean called
on him, and my roommate said, Richard PRR. And the
dean just got this funny look on his face, like,
what in the world did that? Did that kid just say?
And uh? And we finally, you know, sort of straightened
it out. And that's you know, that's how we say,
that's how we say Prior is pror. And he believed
(25:58):
us because we were, you know, we were telling the truth.
But it was you know, it's one of those one
of those pronunciation ticks that's you know, different from a
lot of other parts of the country, and that one
is probably more of kind of a Southern thing in
general than it is just a just a hillbilly thing.
So if you ever hear somebody talk about a disaster
(26:20):
being a tarfhar instead of a tarfire, then you know
you're in a certain part of the country and you
have encountered a regional dialect for sure at that point,
because nobody wants to be involved in a tarfhar.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Doctr Blevin, excuse me, Let's take another question from the
class again, looking for regional dialects.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Who has a question?
Speaker 8 (26:47):
Excuse me, professor. My name is Christy and I grew
up in Saint Louis, Missouri, which is in the very
center of the United States. I've been told the people
from the Midwest have the clearest, most approachable, and easily
understood accent and dialect of anyone in the country. Do
(27:09):
you think that's true?
Speaker 7 (27:12):
Hm?
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Okay, okay, thank you.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
I think what you've just done right here, young lady,
is ostracize yourself from this entire class and this entire
country by your hoity toity Saint Louis roots. The Cardinals
have won the World Series like eleven times, but that
doesn't make a Cardinal and American eagle, now, does it.
I think you should check yourself before you wreck yourself,
(27:40):
as some parts of the country say Doctor Blevin's please
just go on, just carry on.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
And another thing that we had our own phrase for
was a jarfly. A jarfly is a cicada. It's the
kind of annual that would come out. I was probably
thirty years old, and I remember because I can remember
listening to a radio show and they were talking about
(28:09):
the cicadas being in full glory, you know, in Washington,
d c. And I remember thinking, well, that would be
I'd like to hear them cicadas. See what's going on
in that very day, I was probably walking through the
woods and being serenaded by jarflies and didn't know that
it was the same thing. But it was about that
time when I figured out that what I called a
(28:31):
jarfly and what most of the people I grew up
with called jarflies, were with the rest of the world
called cicadas. And apparently the reason they were given the
name jarfly by whoever gave them that name and started,
you know, calling them that was not because you catch
them and put them in a jar like you do
lightning bugs. It's because when you get trees full of
(28:52):
those things and they really crank up. It just kind
of jars your you know, just kind of jarsia that
jarsia enters, that sort of sound that they're that they're making.
And so we're all speaking the same language. It's just
these little little peculiarities around the corner of the languages
that that make them a little different. And as I've said,
(29:13):
the Scots Irish had a lot of influence on the
dialect of especially the Upper South, the Appalachia and the Ozarks,
and some of the old words that we can trace
back to our Scotch Irish forebears words like Irish for
cool or nippy. And one of my favorite terms that
(29:35):
that linguists say was brought over by the Scotch Irish,
and you'd probably still hear maybe in some places and
in Scotland, some rural places, is the word ill, not
meaning someone who's sick, but ill meaning someone who's angry,
who's who's upset about something. And because I can remember
my dad pestering my mom about being ill when I
(29:58):
was a kid, and he wasn't talking about her being sick,
he was talking about her being in bad mood. If
you go back and look at the old Norse word,
or the old Viking word iller uh. It's basically means
the same thing. It can be mean or evil or
nasty or something like that. And that word seeped into
into the language and made its way across and a
(30:20):
lot of these our rural terms too, because as I
said it, you know, dialect tends to survive more heartily
in rural areas. So if I talked about a muley cow,
the word muley means no horns, so it would be
a cow with with no horns on it. That's another
one of those that kind of made its way from
(30:43):
Scott's Irish Gaelic, you know, whatever, whatever they were bringing across.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Sorry to interrupt, Dr Blavin, excuse me. I'd like to
take another question from the class. Anyone have a question.
Speaker 7 (30:55):
My name is Brent and I'm from southeast Darkansas. And
before we had supper my grandma's she always told us
to be sure and wrench your hands off, especially if
we've been cleaning. The big old messis squirrels. It was
pretty clear to us, young is that the difference between
Rnch and Rents was cleaner hands? Now, is that what
you're talking about? A professor, young man?
Speaker 1 (31:16):
That was beautiful. That was beautiful. You had a very
special grandmother, didn't you.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Finally, a truly intelligent example of regional dialect. I have
no idea why that woman said ranch instead of rents.
It doesn't even make sense. It's not even connected to
some other country. But it does make some beautiful American
folk poetry. Thank you for your contribution to this class.
(31:46):
Rent it's students like you. I don't want to get
choked up here. It's students like you that make my job,
in doctor Blevin's job so fulfilling.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
This is why we do it. Carry on, Doctor Blevin's
just carry on.
Speaker 4 (32:15):
And then we've got a lot of words in our
lexicon that basically just mean crooked or out of whack,
out of plum, something like that. You've got words like
a anti goglin, which you may have heard, or pygoglin
that means the same thing anti Goglin and sygoglin. There's
caddie wampus. My favorite is wamper jawled. In my family,
(32:39):
it was wamper jawled. I think it's probably more commonly
whopper yawned. And we can trace it back again to
like Middle and maybe even Old English the word whopper
was a verb that meant to oscillate or to move
around erradically. Another fun word and this, I think this
is a pretty common word and has come common in
(33:00):
the last thirty years. Is bumfuzzled? Bum fuzzled? Is it
means to be confused, disoriented, something like that. And it
was almost exactly twenty five years ago. It was in
late October of nineteen ninety nine and Bill Clinton was
president and he used the term bum fuzzled at a
(33:20):
press conference and he was criticizing the Republican's proposed budget
for that year, and he said something like this is
going to bum fuzzle the American people. And the East
coast and West coast press just went crazy over this
word because nobody knew what it meant at that time.
(33:41):
Apparently it wasn't as common as as it is today.
But in Slate magazine had it whole article dedicated to
the president using the word the word bum fuzzled and
a press conference, and they speculated that maybe it's a
code word that you know, he sent and the secret
messages to somebody.
Speaker 5 (34:02):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
But there was all this speculation on what the what
the president was saying with bum fuzzled, and they were.
You know, this is in the very early days of
the of the internet, so it wasn't as easy just
to go, you know, look stuff up as it as
it is today. But i'll just I'll just talk about
a few more of the rules if you want to
(34:22):
talk like a like a backwoodsman or you know, somebody
from Appalachi or the Ozarks. One of the obvious ones
is you take words that end in ow and turn
into er. So you've got o yeller, you've got winder.
You wouldn't have set a menow trap around here, you'd
set a mintor trap. You go, uh, walking through the meta,
(34:45):
you know, good old feller, just any pretty much any
word uh. And I can even remember, you know, the
the soft drink of mellow yellow. I can remember people
calling that mellow yeller when I was the k And
this is one you'll you'll recognize too, if you talk
about using the word one after a nown, like the
(35:09):
big one or the next one or the little one.
It was old Scott's Irish style to just turn it
into un. So you've got young and biggin, little and
next and all those any phrase where you would end
it with one, you just turn it into kind of
a U N and squeeze them together and again, you know,
(35:33):
going back to the Andy Griffith Show, which was one
of the better displays of Upland South dialect that we've
ever had on a you know, on this kind of
national basis, he would usually refer to Opie as a
youngin and not as a as a child or a
kid or anything like that. It was usually a young
(35:55):
and so he had ain't b and he had young
and And my other favorite example of like Hollywood getting
it right for a change is the movie sling Blade.
I remember, I think I teared up two or three
times in that movie. I was so excited. Of course,
Billy Bob Thornton is also from the Upland South more,
(36:17):
you know, the wash it talls kind of the edge
of the wash italls instead of the Ozarks. But we
all pretty much sound the same. We're not that far apart.
And there were a couple that won me over. He
used the term stob and used it correctly. Stob Linguists
will say, that's our word. Stob is just it's descended
(36:39):
from kind of a Scottish pronunciation of the word stub,
kind of what you know, a scot or an Irish
person would sound like if they said stub, it would
sound sort of like stob. Like if you bush hog
a field, you're left with a bunch of little stobs,
a little tiny stumps in sling blade. The little boy
was he had this stub of a stick that he's
(37:01):
warping the ground with. And warping that's another good word.
You know, you've got to if you're hitting something, you're
you're warping it. And and Carl comes up and says,
what are you doing with that stob? And you know,
it was something that most people probably wouldn't pick up
on unless you were from an area where you stob regularly.
(37:22):
And then the other one was at the end where
I won't give away anything for people who haven't watched
the movie, but when Carl picks up the phone and
calls after he's taken care of of Dole instead of Doyle,
you know, he's taking care of Dole and he and
he tells him to bring a hurst, and a hurst
(37:43):
of course, in a lot of rural areas, a hearst
was an ambulance, as we might say, or an ambulance
by putting that tea on the end of that. That
was another one of those things that you often hear
in southern and you know Appalachian and ozark speech. So
(38:03):
you got a it's a hearst instead of a hearse
it's once instead of once, twice instead of twice, give
me a chance instead of chance. And there you're doing
a couple of You're you're turning the short a into
a long a, and you're sticking a T on the
I don't know why why we do that, why we
put a t on on the end of a lot
(38:25):
of words like that, but we do. And that's another
one of those things that that sling Blade got right,
and that's why everybody should watch sling Blade.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Doctor Levin's excuse me again, I'd like to take just
one last question from the students as we celebrate all
of America's regional dialects.
Speaker 9 (38:46):
Anyone, thank you, professor. Yeah, my name is Bear and
I'm from western Arkansas. Uh, my father, grandfather and actually
as far back as we can remember, pronounce the word
spelled a c o r n as akren a corn.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Is that a good example of regional dialect?
Speaker 7 (39:04):
Well?
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Well, well, haven't we saved the best comment for last
young man.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
That was powerful.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Just give me a minute here to myself. That was powerful.
Thank you. Trying not to get emotional, but that was
raw cultural zeitgeist power. Go ahead, doctor Blebans, just carry
on with your final point.
Speaker 4 (39:31):
Thank you. My last rule of how to talk hillbilly
or how to talk oz are it's it's putting an
A on the front of an action verb. And a
linguist called this, if I can get this right, an
archaic intensifying prefix. That's a really fancy way of saying
(39:52):
sticking an A on the front of something just to
just to kind of give it a little umph, you know,
to give it a little more power, which is something
that linguists say was brought over not by the Scott's Irish,
but by settlers from a certain region of England where
that had been common, and it survived in Appalachia and
the Ozarks more than it has anywhere else. But it's
(40:15):
also sometimes called a prefixing. And so I can remember
very vividly from my childhood people talking about, Oh, their
kids are running in a bucking deers are jumping over
the fence. You know, you put that A on the
front of something, and we may think it sounds kind
of crazy and that it only shows up in Billy
(40:37):
Bob Thornton movies. But if you think of if you
think of music, it's in a lot of old songs
that we still have, like the ten Days or the
twelve Days of Christmas, ten lords a leaping, eight maids
of milking, seven swans of swimming, six geese a laying.
As recently as the seventeen hundreds, that would have been
(40:58):
a pretty common thing.
Speaker 6 (41:01):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (41:01):
The old song a hunting we will go if you
remember that one from childhood, hunting we will go, hunting,
we will go. Uh, there's even a segment in there.
Let's see, we'll we'll catch a bear and cut his
hair and then we'll let him go. I don't know
if if bear grease you know, supports that that kind
(41:21):
of treatment of bears, But that that's one that's another
one of those peculiar grammatical features that a lot of times,
if you if you grew up in that dialect, you're
probably using don't even realize you're using it. Yeah, you
see what I did there, and it's you know, I
think it's a it's a good thing to be comfortable
(41:45):
with your dialect to a certain degree, and especially if
you're from south of a certain point in the United States,
you're you sometimes feel kind of shamed into into sloughing
that off and conform in to standard English. But I
don't feel compelled any more to do that. And even
(42:07):
though I'm sure I do a lot of times. You know,
I always tell people just, you know, talk how you
want to talk, and talk how you feel comfortable talking
if you can get away with it. You know, we're
excited about dialects and uniqueness and all that kind of
stuff till it starts costing us money and then it's time,
you know, to talk like the guy on the on
(42:27):
the evening news.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
Doctor Blevin's. That was very informative. I remember that you
had a story about going to church. If you don't
mind go ahead and tell us that story.
Speaker 4 (42:39):
Yeah, this this little church and in the Arkansas Ozarks
that had invited me to come and speak one Sunday morning.
And and I'm not a preacher, and you know, I
wouldn't feel comfortable at all, you know, launching into a
sermon or anything like that, and nobody would, nobody else
would be comfortable if I if I tried to do
(42:59):
that too. So I actually I took the the Adam
and Eve's story from the Bible and I rendered it
in basically in hillbilly language. And I'm not trying to
be irreverent. This is the this is the Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden story. Now, once upon
(43:23):
a time, and that garden of Eden was a snake,
and that snake was as smart as could be. He
sidled up to this little goal and he says, look
at here. There's fruit of hanging everywhere, is off in
the trees and bushes, and this here garden. And you're
a telling me that the Lord said gens can't eat
an every bite of it. No, the gal says, I reckon,
(43:44):
we can eat airy. We want acepting that fruit on
that big and over there right smack dab in the middle.
The old Master said, don't be a messing with that,
don't even touch it. If and we do, we'll surely
pass on. Well, that snake was an andre dickens, just
plum full of devilment. He says, why that ain't right.
You ain't about to die. The Lord don't want you
(44:05):
eating the goodies off that big tree, because when you
do you'll be just as sharp as he is, and
that's the gospel truth, or the Lord can strike me down. Well,
this old gal took a gander of that tree that
she ain't supposed to be nowhere's around, and she got
to study on them how larp and that fruit would be, Oh,
it would be the stewed rosin. So she peeped around
(44:28):
this away in that way, she reached over and snatched
her apple and etter aback. Then she carried some to
a feller, and he had him a little bit of it.
Soon as the both of them had gnawed off a
piece and swallowed it, plumped down their goosele. Well, you
better know something powerful commenced working on their thinking directly.
They come too and figured out they was naked as
(44:50):
a jaybird. So the old gal rustled up a jaggu
leaves off a catoffie tree and hemmed them into something
looked like a big old night shirt. She fixed up
some short riches for the fella. It being right peculiar
for men to sold long about dusky dark, Here come
the Lord of walking through the garden, and they heard
him and pushed up. The lord hollered out, where are you?
(45:13):
The fella hollered back right here. Lord, I heard you coming,
but I got scared and hit out on account of
my nakedness. Well, who in the dickens told you he
is naked? Said the Lord. I swan you's been eating
off that tree. I said to leave bee, ain't you?
Then the fella says, hit was this old gal you
put in here with me? Lord? I know it? She'd
(45:33):
be more trouble than a wild cat in a paper poke.
She brung me something to eat, and I added, seeing
as how I ain't in the habit of fixing my
mowan dinner. So the Lord says to this old gal,
how come you to do such a thing? She says, hit,
was that drotted snake? Why he bumfuzzled me so much?
My mind just clabbered up.
Speaker 5 (45:51):
Now.
Speaker 4 (45:51):
You might think that snake would have tailed it out
of here by now, but he ain't done it. And
you better know the Lord was ill as a hornet. Oh,
he cut his eyes at that snake, and he sure
enough told him how the cow eat the cabbage. Because
of this here mess you made for the rest of
time and creation, You're gonna crawl around down on your
belly all caddywampus in the dirt. You and this here
(46:14):
old gal ain't gonna like each other. A tall fact
of business. Her youngins is gonna stomp on your youngin's heads,
and your youngins is gonna use pis in his teeth
to bite her youngin's heels. Then the Lord gave the
old gal and her feller are talking to like they
ain't never heard. He said to the old gal, you're
gonna get in a family way, and having that young
(46:35):
and will hurt you a right smart and to see
to it that you're told never ceases. You're gonna be
stuck with this here feller, what tattled on you and
what can't cook her soul for the rest of your life.
As for you, Feller, the Lord told him, you aren't
a done what you did just because your wife told
you to. For that, You're gonna spend your life at
(46:55):
digging in this hard, rocky ground just to survive. You'll
have to live all for polke salad and lambs quarters
and squirrel. And when some ever you fix on to
grow in something, you'll be tormented by pigweed and poor
joe and crabgrass and every other infernal weed under the heavens,
your sweat' water the fields, but it's salt will pies
(47:16):
in the ground, and one day, one day, you'll go
back to the dirt what made you, and they ain't
nary a thing you can do about it.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode. I want
to think are distinguished guest lecture Dr Brooks, Blevins and
all of our wonderful students. Sometimes the things that appear
to be differences are actually the things.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
That make us the same.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear, Grease
and Brents this country life podcast.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Please leave us a review on.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
iTunes, Share this episode with somebody this week.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
We hope you have a wonderful Christmas.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
Seasons cheap the wild places wild, so that's where the
bears live.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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