Milo, in an other thread used the comment "suck hind tit"
not beign a country girl, i am guessing, that it is a reerence to multi teated animals (like a pig) . I know that the milk from pig teats is not all the same.. higher up (towards head and shoulder) the milk has more fat and nutrients, lower down, towards the tail, the milk is weaker.. and baby piglets quickly learn that, and establish a ranking order.. with the biggest strongest piglets getting an upper tit, and the lowest ranking of their peers getting a low tit.

WELL, my point is country saying like this have become very popular of late (dr phil of american tv is almost as famous for them as anything else..

so what is the most interesting such saying you know?

Not sure if it's the most interesting, but 'slicker'n owl shit' comes first to mind. Seems to me it would take a certain narrow set of circumstances for anyone to know just how slick owl shit was.

I don't know who Dr. Phil is but I once heard in a film a southern guy say "It's as useful as tits on a boarhog".

Does this qualify for the slack-jawed yokelism?

I thought metaphor and simile have always been popular, but I could be mistaken. (Ya know, I'm just a simple country boy.) Is it just the rustic quality that makes these philisms quaint or memorable? If I said "as useless as teats on a taxicab" is that less quaint and more offensive? Key say?

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it would be difficult to be only as slick as owl shit or not as slick. Owls eat meat, nuthin' else. And that makes for rockhard excremental pellets. And owls also expel little "packets" containing the bones of their prey. American Scientific and Surplus sells them occasionally for disecting purposes!

In my mind I categorize most of these highly descriptive phrases as US Southern regionalisms, though not sure why. T

One other category of regionalism that comes to mind is the dropping of "to be" from sentences that for most of us require them. I remember very well the first time I heard this; a guy I worked with when I was in college looked out the window of the bank we were working in and said, "The lawn needs mowed." I knew immediately what he meant and made a silent vow to hogtie and beat any of my offspring who used this abomination. Ever after I have associated this regionalism with South Central Pennsylvania, which is where I have heard it the most. And it may not actually be a regionalism, I admit, but almost always the perp has hailed from that part of the country.

it would be difficult to be only as slick as owl shit or not as slick.

You're mistaking those regurgitated pellets (of bone and fur) for owl shit, which is quite liquid and white, and can burn the paint off a truck. owl shit is indeed slick.

ROFL! You know I've never had it said that nicely to me before: "TEd, you just don't know SHIT!"

the paint off a truck

is truck paint particularly tenacious?

If I said "as useless as teats on a taxicab" is that less quaint and more offensive?

I'm not sure about the offensive question, but in NY it would be "...seats in a taxi cab" (er.. at least my two tree rides in them).

"The lawn needs mowed."

He was a'sayin' "this lawn need mowin'", but he done had a head cold.

***********

Something tells me (although I've not sat through one of Dr'Phil's "sessions" <ahem>) that he would never use the quite *popular phrase "You go stick that where your mama never washed".

well, it got cold here yesterday, but not quite as cold as a witch's tit...

Ah, yup. You can prolly remove auto paint with soap and water.

witch's tit

Better keep those brass monkeys inside.

brass monkeys



that was my next one!

of course, if it were really cold, it would be a witches tit in a brass bra...

From toit to tit (French to English), as well as tectum to pectus (Latin). O, non texi ergo peccavi!

silly me--i was thinking along the lines of 'crooked as a ram horn--only well more colorful.. DR Phil is a TV psycologist (think of Fraizer with a TV show!) only as stuffy and proper as Fraizer was, Dr. Phil tries to show he is a country boy from texas (even if he is dressed in suilt, graduated from yale, and host of a network TV show!)

he's gone from the classic 'do i look like i just fell off a turnup truck?" to other ver elabroate phrases..(and all of them pass muster on network TV-I don't think slick than owl shit would..

The lawn needs mowed.

Perfect! Such economy of words, without wasted thought.

Ted, you sound like Lionel Twain (Truman Capote) admonishing the great Chinese detective Professor Wang (Peter Sellers) in the Neil Simon 1976 movie Murder By Death when he shrieked...

"Listen, you rotund escapee from a fire drill, Say...Your... Damn... ARTICLES!

Or something like that.

Air conditioning, not television, is the reason that most southerners speak poorly today. The south is hot. It is so hot down here that our jaybirds go buck naked and laze under oak trees that sell them shade for ten cents a spot. Down here it is so hot that most southerners became philosophers and poets because the extreme heat and humidity makes it unhealthy to do real work.
Imagine this scene from the fifties...

Two handsome southern gentlemen sit rocking in chairs on the front porch of a weather-beaten farmhouse. Two hours past; then one speaks...

Milo: The lawn needs mowed.

Uncle Dan: (five minutes past.) (Uncle Dan nods.)
(Uncle Dan understands that Milo was simply stating a fact. No where in his statement is an implied "to be". Mowed is used as an adjective of lawn and "needs" is simply a negating form of mowed, and no one is expected to mow any lawn any time - ever.)
An hour passes.

Milo: Dan, best hide the women folk.

Uncle Dan: ( Only two minutes past. Then Uncle Dan nods, and slowly gets up and goes into the house and hides the women folk.)

(In a cloud of dust a 1957 fishtailed Buick pulls up and stops in front of the farm house. A dapper man wearing a white hat and white socks and a shiny green sport coat with matching alligator shoes gets out of the Buick and walks over and asks for a drink of water...unfortunately he forgets himself and asks for the water in Latin and is misunderstood.)

And then he says...

jheem: From toit to tit (French to English), as well as tectum to pectus (Latin). O, non texi ergo peccavi!

Milo: (Shouting) Uncle Dan! Bring yourself here right this minute. This furriner here needs watered. You go and show him the well and stuff him right in!

Uncle Dan was slow but he jumped. He showed jheem the well and stuffed him in. Afterwards Milo and Uncle Dan rode around for a few weeks in jheem's '57 fish-tail Buick until they wrecked it. Then they towed it over to Billy Earl's garage to get it fixed but Billy Earl said it weren't worth fixing.

Jheem? Jheem is fine. After a fashion he climbed out of the well, dumped his wet clothes and, naked as a jaybird, he walked over to Massey's General Store and bought himself some nice appropriate duds and joined the Free-will Baptist Church. Never again did jheem ( who now pronounces his name gee-uh-UM like they do down south) ever speak devil talk when in the company of the good citizenry of the ignorant South.

___________________________________________ The End

Storytime, or Not Knowing Somebody From a Load of Hay

One bright fall day, little Fred (for in those days jheem had yet to take Sanskrit) and his Uncle Bill were driving an old Ford F-100 truck with a full load of hay to a local racetrack. Along the way, they passed a decrepid old farm with a handpainted sign out front that read: "Wood for Sale" only the s in sale was written backwards.

Fred: Ha! The guy who wrote that sign sure was ignorant! He got his s backwards.

Uncle Bill: Well, not really. He did it on purpose, so that folks who buy anything from him would feel superior in their spelling skills, forget themselves, and not bargain as hard as they should over the price. You see, I went to grammar school with the fellow who owns that farm, and he spells as well as the rest of us.

Fred: Hmm.

Later in life, and while travelling the Old South, jheem (for he had since studied Panini's grammar, as well as Shakespeare's) was supsicious of any self-professed ignorance on the part of any part of the populace, and learned to judge a person's morals by his actions and not his accent or grammar.

Moral of the story: A person may change his accent or grammar but not his ethics.

Moral of the story: A person may change his accent or grammar but not his ethics.

Moral of semantics: A person may change his ideas about ethics;
but not his morals without compromising his sense of self.

______________________________ Johnny "Gitar" Watson, Summer, 1957.

Moral of semantics: A person may change his ideas about ethics; but not his morals without compromising his sense of self.

O che sciagura d'essere senza coglioni!

Francois Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire) [1694–1778]

Young Folklorist: Mr Spence, I couldn't help noticing that you play all of your songs in the same tuning, dropped-D tuning, and the same key, D major. Why is that?

Spence: I used to know all them keys! I knew 'em all: A, and B, and D, and F, and H ... I used to know all them keys!

YF: Well, Mr Spence, if that's true, then why do you play everything in the same key of D? Why don't you use any of those other keys?

Spence: I got tired of 'em!

In memoriam. Joseph Spence [1910–1984]

Like it or not, jheem, any friend of Joseph Spence is a friend of mine.
(Look, I didn't make the rules...I just play by them.)

I grew up just 25 miles NW of NYC. We had a family friend from Alabama (PhD in Chemistry), who used a variety of unique (to us) phrases. My favorite: “Grinnin’ like a mule eatin’ briars”.

Grinnin’ like a mule eatin’ briars

Well now, if that doesn't sound like Eeyore's favorite food being thistles...!

Down Texas way, the phrase is: "Grinin' like a possum eatin' shit off a wire brush."

Forgive me, I am merely the messenger.

Prettier than a speckled pup in a watermelon patch.

Nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

Prouder n a pig with a purple pocket book.

"I'm so broke I can't spend the night."

"I'm ain't fattening no more frogs for snakes"

"Dance with the one what brought you"

>"Dance with the one what brought you"


That there's some hifalutin' Northern English (well North Little Rock anyways). We says it as, "Dance with the one what brung ya."

"I'm ain't fattening no more frogs for snakes"

What does that refer to, themilum?


Here’s a few more from ‘round these parts:

“The apple don’t fall too far from the tree.”

“He/she’s dumb as shit, and proud of it!”


How about some examples of folksy sayings, epigrams, quips, etc. coined by AWAD members?

That there's some hifalutin' Northern English (well North Little Rock anyways). We says it as, "Dance with the one what brung ya."

Well, I'll swannee, Ted, you him what wakes up the cock.
Ain't no use'en high-stepping 'round yo stays.
"hifalutin' " don't get no nevermind,
and ye'uns jes' talk plain and just.

" fattening frogs for snakes"

Dgeigh, if you keep a frog in a pen and feed
him grubs and flies to fatten him up, it is somewhat
disheartening to have a snake slide in and eat him all up.
Same thing goes when you fatten up women.

- Milum ( just visiting )

I cain't see no reason why you'd wanna fatten no frogs irregardless a whether or not they was or wasn't no snakes or not.

"...but don't forget who's takin' you home, and in his arms you're gonna be, so darlin' save the last dance for me." Drifters
yeah - I'm late for the dance (again)

Ifn ya growed em, ya don hafta gig em.
plus snakes is harder ta ketch

Just heard this one a few days ago..In response to How are you doing?
Sort of like a blind hog--just before he starves, he finds another acorn.

"Dance with the one what brought you"

AH-HA!!! Is that where the habit of substituting "what" for "that" originated - down southern way?