A Day On Lake Santeetlah
A lovely day on Lake Santeetlah with soaring eagles, large fish, a dragonfly and ducks! Take a look at this video… http://youtu.be/DVLPkYL2A8Q
Old Southern Politicalisms
Bourbon – A Democrat of the straightest sect, a “fire-eater”. Applied for the most part to Southern Democrats of the old school. This use of the word probably antedates the Civil War but no instance of such use has been found in print. We must look to the old Bourbon party in France – uncompromising adherents of political tradition for its paternity. “They learned nothing and forgot nothing.”
Buncombe, Bunkum, etc. – Talking merely for talk’s sake. The original employment of the word in this sense is ascribed to a member of Congress from Buncombe County, North Carolina, who explained that he was merely “talking for Buncombe,” when his fellow-members could not comprehend why he was making a speech.
Chivalry – “The Southern Chivalry” was a common phrase before and during the Civil War. It was claimed as a proud title by Southerners and their friends but has always been heard and used in the North with a shade of derisive contempt.
Fire-Eater – A bitter Southern partisan. It came into use during the early anti-slavery, and is of frequent occurrence in the journals of that time. It is equivalent to Bourbon, but probably of earlier origin.
Mason and Dixon’s Line – A boundary line surveyed in 1766 by two English surveyors, named Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, to settle a dispute as to territory between Pennsylvania and Maryland. It follows the fortieth parallel of latitude, and was originally marked by milestones having on one side the armorial bearings of Penn, and on the other those of Lord Baltimore.
Mountain Dialect
The Appalachian people have a marked Scotch-Irish strain, one would expect their speech to show a strong Scotch influence. So far as vocabulary is
concerned there is really little of it. A few words, caigy (cadgy), coggled, fernent, gin for if, needcessity, trollop, almost exhaust the list of distinct Scotticisms. The Scotch-Irish as they are called, were mainly Ulstermen, and the Ulster dialect of today bear little analogy to that of Appalachia.
Scotch influence does appear, however in one vital characteristic of the pronunciation: with few exceptions the highlanders sound “r” distinctly wherever it occurs though they will never trill it. In the British Isles this constant sound of “r” in all positions is peculiar to Scotland, Ireland and a few small districts in the northern border counties of England.
Throughout Appalachia such words as last, past, advantage, are pronounced with the same vowel as is heard in man. In the early 20th century it was noted that the average mountaineer’s vocabulary did not exceed three hundred words. This may be a natural inference if one spends but a few weeks among these people and sees them only under the prosaic conditions of workaday life. But gain their intimacy and one shall find that even the less literate among them have a range of expression that is truly remarkable. Seldom is a hillbilly at a loss for a word. Lacking other means of expression, there will come “spang” from his mouth a coinage of his own. Instantly he will create (always form English roots, of course) new words iby combination or by turning nouns into verbs or otherwise interchanging the parts of speech.
Crudity or deficiency of the verb characterizes the speech of all secluded societies. In mountain vernacular many words that serve as verbs are only nouns of action or adjectives or even adverbs. “That bear ‘ll meat me a month.” “Granny kept faultin’ us all day.” “Are ye fixin to go squirrelin’?” “Sis blouses her waist a purpose to carry a pistol.” “This poke salat eats good.”
A verb will be coined from an adverb: “We better git some wood, bettern we?” Or from an adjective: “Much that dog and see won’t he come along” (pet him, make much of him). “I didn’t do nary thing to contrary her”.
Conversely, nouns are created from verbs. “Hit don’t make no differ.” “I didn’t hear no give out at meetin’” (announcement). “You can git ye one more gittin’ o’ wood up thar.” “That Natahala is a master shut0in, jest a plumb gorge.” Or from an adjective: “Them bugs – the little old hatefuls!” “If anybody wanted a history of this county for fifty years he’d git a lavish of it by reading the mine suite testimony.”
Luck with Potatoes
There was a man over in Cherokee County who had some mighty good luck with ‘taters. He planted them on a steep hillside and when he dug under the row, one of the big ones rolled down the hillside and a great slew of dirt followed after. The dirt dammed up a good-sized stream and made a fifty acre lake, bored a hole through a little mountain, where the railroad company was fixin’ to dig a tunnel, and went on down a half mile further and dammed up a stream where a company was planning to build a power plant.
With the money he for his lake, and what the railroad paid him for the tunnel and with what he got from the power company for saving them the price of a dam, he was sure sitting on top of the world.
He didn’t always have such good luck. There was the time when he couldn’t afford to buy a hen and chickens. He got so down and out he tried to kill himself. He had a old pistol, but he was afraid it would work, so he went down to the store and bought a gallon of kerosene, a piece of strong rope and some rat poison. Then he went down to the river and got in a boat and rowed down to where some trees hung way out over the water.
He tied the rope around his neck and to the limb of a tree, soaked himself in kerosene and ate the rat poison, and set his clothes on fire, figuring that he should shoot himself just as he kicked the boat out from under him.
Well, he kicked the boat away and the pistol went off and shot the rope in two, he fell in the water and that put out the fire in his clothes, and he got to choking and strangling when he went under – and threw up the poison. He figured his luck had changed, so he swum over to the bank and announced himself as a candidate for the legislature. Got elected, too.
The Toughest of the Tough
There is a story they tell about the people of Western North Carolina. For a great many years they were considered to be the toughest of the tough, especially those mountaineers living in the vicinity they called Shelton Laurel. They tell a tale of an old feller going to Asheville for an appendicitis operation. They put him in the hospital and operated on him. The following morning the physician went in to see how he was getting along, and instead of finding him in bed, he found him sitting in a chair hovered over a radiator. The physician said to him, “Ah-ah! You ought not to be sitting up. You’ll tear your stitches out.” And the old feller looked up at the doctor and he said, “What’s the matter, doc? Ain’t your thread no good.”