Bear Grease - Ep. 278: Hillbilly Speech

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

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. If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [e-mail] Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days and real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. Good morning, students. My name is Professor Newcomb, and this is Bear Greece 101, where we study things forgotten but relevant and look for insight in unlikely places.

I'm so glad that you're here on this chilly December morning. Yeah, hey, will you stop doing that? Quit throwing stuff. Thank you. Today, we're going to do things a little bit different than usual. We have a very distinguished guest election. today here by the name of Dr. 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, the hillbilly dialect of the Ozarks and Appalachian regions. But we're going to 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? Excuse me, Professor Newcomb. I just wanted to know, will we have an opportunity to talk about the regional dialects of where we're from as well? 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 Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. Okay, students, let's pipe down 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 Dr. Blevins. You know, he's written like 15 books on the history of the Ozarks.

Very interesting man. Remember, we'll be using the Ozark and Appalachian dialects, but really we're going to see how regional dialects apply all over the United States. Here's Dr. Blevins, and he'll be jumping right in. I mean, like fast. Let me start out by saying, we all have a dialect. You probably only recognize it from other people because most people think, well, I talk normal and everybody else is a little crazy. But every language on earth, if there are enough speakers in that language, you have dialects.

And it's just a form of a language that is specific to a particular region or a particular group. of speakers within that language. 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 pronounced today as they once were because we all watch the same TV and we've been listening

to the same radio for 100 years, and we've 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 argue that dialects aren't going away. They might seem like it, and we may start to talk more and more like somebody on the 6 o'clock news. But, you know, I've heard arguments that dialects are with us, and they'll stay with us. They'll just change like language. over the years. But that's, but so I got interested in this. 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 people in, 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. And we can trace a lot of these influences 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 1700s, and a lot of their language patterns and eccentricities have survived into the 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 what 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 in the late 700s and continuing into the 1000s, 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 in, you know, if you want to call it Hillbilly dialect or upland South dialect, whatever, we can even trace back to old Norse or Viking words. But one of the things that I've noticed over the years is,

and pretty much everybody in the United States notices this, that there are certain dialects that we associate with intelligence, in 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 great intelligence. It kind of falls into that greater southern dialect thing where people from other parts of the country hear you

and often just jump to the assumption that, you know, this person is uneducated or maybe they don't know that. much and and so what a what a lot of us end up doing is when we go off to college or we start a career or something we become very self-conscious about the way we sound 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 and try to

sound like other people, but what often happens is once you get more comfortable 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 whose opinion you value, I find that a lot of people are then more comfortable to kind of slip back into that dialect and sort of pick it up and maybe value it more, maybe think of the way. your grandparents, 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 I think a lot of people are probably like me and they feel more confident in talking that way.

There's certain code words that linguists would tell you, like the word own, oh, N, which I pronounce own with a long O, that's one of the first ones, I think, that you would, if you were trying to lose your southern accent or your hillbilly accent or whatever, you know, you would switch that to on. There are various ways that you can say the word O-N. And sometimes that's kind of an indicator

to other people of where you're from or where you're trying to sound like you're from. And I've heard people say, well, it's, you know, I started saying on when I was in grad school or med school or whatever. And instead of own, because that's, you know, that's one of those kind of triggered words that people, we turn a lot of short vowel sounds into long bowel sounds. And it's the same way, if you ever watch the Andy Griffith show, Andy's has Aunt B. It's not, it's not Aunt B or Aunt B in Mayberry. it's ain't be. And when I grew up, it was always ain't so-and-so. It was, you know, you didn't, you didn't say ant. It was, it was ain't. That's another one of those examples of a word that we've

taken what would normally be in standard English, a short vowel sound and turned it into a long vowel sound. 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 boon biographer Robert Morgan, dear friend of mine, I know over the years my language has been honed like a buoy knife on Arkansas wet stone, 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? Yes, young man with your hand up. 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 word. the nasal passages. For instance, my grandfather, when he would go cut firewood, he would say that he wanted logs cut 24 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, oh, oh, and then you might follow that up with, oh, look 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 Nukum? Hmm. That's interesting. Very interesting. But no. No, man.

That's just hogwash. You're going to need to wash your mouth out with bare grease, lie soap on that one, son. But let's get back to Dr. Blevins. And remember, we'll be taking more questions later, so we'll get back to the rest of the class. Dr. Blevins, go on. 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 notice when they come into contact with anybody is their accent. And some of those are more pronounced than others. So that's one part, how you sound when you talk. Then there's what we call the 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 in Appalachia in the South that you would probably not hear in New York or California or somewhere like that,

but are still kind of standard words in our language. And again, any regional dialect is going to have 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 funest one to talk about, but it's the one that linguists say is the one that holds on the longest is grammar. Every dialect has these peculiar grammatical features. 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 can be standard. to a certain place. So if I'm talking about my garden and say, boy, my peas grow great last year, our house got a gas leak and blowed up, you know, that kind of thing. In other words, bad grammar, bad subject predicate, you know, linking up there.

And there are plenty of those in the dialect of the South and the hillbilly dialect in general. My kids have always had great. great fun 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 Isard County ease when I'm at home but they'll hear me like giving a speech or something at a at a college and and and that's my that's my smart voice you know that and they like making fun of me over using my smart voice but I've tried not to make those so starkly you know separate from each other.

But 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. When I was a kid growing up here on the farm, I don't know that my grandparents ever used 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 were back.

And we know it, you know, it entered English probably through Norman French, P-O-Q-U-E, which was a word for pouch or pocket. And, 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 20th century, if you had been in, you. in Iceland at that time, again, kind of a descendant of Viking language. If you carried something in a sack or a bag, it was a pokey. And so our poke and 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 United States where it died out in most other places.

But that's a word that 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. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use.

I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. but when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you do. did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Okay, class, that was an invigorating exploration of oratory energy by Dr. Blevins.

You know, they say he once lectured a summertime bear gorging on blackberries right into his winter den. The sucker went to sleep right there in the spring. Can you imagine Dr. Blevins' grandparents calling a sack a poke? That is hilarious. 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 area said that might be kind of old-timey or regional? Anybody?

Yes, yes, you, young man. Chester Floyd from central eastern Wisconsin, kind of over by Fondalak area, you know, Lake Winne, So they go. Anyways, you know, people always say there, like look over there. But in Wisconsin we say there. Like, hey, look out the window. There's some deer over there. Is that kind of what you're talking about?

Well, no. That was ridiculous in a butchery of a beautiful language that took thousands of years to develop. A man has sculpted English language like a glacier carving out of valley. And what you just said was more like the work of a cat five bulldozer with a Marlboro red hanging out of the driver's mouth, son. Thank you for sharing about Wisconsin. But let's get back to Dr. Blevins, okay? There are a handful of things that help dialect survive in certain places where it might die out in other places, or at least 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 you're in a rural area, a 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, are less likely to have gone to college than in other places. That's another thing that ensures that these regional dialects or ethnic dialects or whatever they are, they'll 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, you're more likely to find that in a place. that has at least a couple of these factors working in its favor, and you're especially likely to find it if you've got all three of them working. But one of the things I like to do when I'm talking about dialect is I'll put up words on a screen. I'll ask people how they pronounce them,

and then, you know, we'll see how you pronounce it in the Ozarks or Appalachia or something like that. and another one was the word 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 actually directly.

So 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 they tend to be efficient and economic. You often cut out a syllable or two in the process of saying things, and it just makes it quicker and easier to say. Oil, 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. Dr. Blevins, I'd just like to interrupt for a second. 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 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. Who has a question? Just raise your hand. Professor, Professor, Professor Newcomb, 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. Passing them things over chair That means over there Passing those things over there

And then the last thing is over yonder Over yonder that means way over there Over yonder That's what you're looking for right That's what you're looking for Hmm Texas uh huh That's that's interesting

And a very compelling story But no No 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. But thank you. Dr. Blevins, just carry on. When I'm talking to people 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 e sound. So, for instance, in my garden out here, one of my favorite things to eat out of the garden is okri. And, of course, most of the English-speaking world would call that okra. But it's an old tradition. And linguist date that style of speaking, of changing that a sound to an e-sound on the end of words,

all the way back to colonial America. They really don't know exactly 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, especially 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 linguists call the schwa, which is the uh sound on the end of a word and just turned it into an e sound. So you got Okre, you've got the Grand O'OOPRI. That's where that comes from. There's all kinds of women's names that end in A. And when I was a kid, most of them. So he got Aunt Berthy instead of Bertha and Marthy instead of Martha. and my grandma was Alberta, but if anybody ever called her 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. In some men, there aren't as many men's names that end in that schwa sound,

but I can remember my grandpa talking about his uncle Noe, and that was Noah, like Noah's Ark, 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 this is more of a southern pronunciation tick, is turning that eye on the front into kind of an awe sound. So you got, instead of Ira, you've got Ari.

And 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 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 a, when I was a senior in college, we had a little Quizbo tournament. And the dean of our faculty, who was from Massachusetts, was the one who was reading the questions. He was 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 roommate,

who's smartest guy I've ever known, you know, he grew up on a farm outside of Mammoth Springs, Spring of Arkansas and very much had that, you know, kind of hill country accent thing going on. And he buzzed in and the dean called on him and my roommate said, Richard Pryor. And the dean just got this funny look on his face. Like, what in the world did that kid just say? And we finally, you know, sort of straightened it out. And that's, you know, that's how we say prior is Pryor. And he believed us because we were, you know, we were telling the truth.

But it was, you know, it's 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 hillbilly thing. So if you ever hear somebody talk about a disaster being a tar far instead of a tire fire, 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 tarfarr. Dr. Blevitt, excuse me, let's take another question from the class. Again, looking for regional dialects. Who has a question? Excuse me, Professor, my name is Christy, and I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, which is in the very center of the United States.

I've been told that people from the Midwest have the clearest, most approachable, and easily understood accent and dialect of anyone in the country. Do you think that's true? Hmm. Okay. Okay. Thank you. 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 St. Louis. roots. The Cardinals have one, the World Series, like 11 times, but that doesn't make a Cardinal an American Eagle now, does it? I think you should check yourself before you wreck yourself,

as some parts of the country say. Dr. Blevins, please, just go on, just carry on. And another thing that we had our own phrase for was a jarfly. A jarfly is a cicada. It's the kind of annual cicada that would come out. I was probably 30 years old, and I remember, because I can remember listening to a radio show, and they were talking about 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. I see what's going on. And 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 jarfly and what most of the people I grew up with called jarflies were what 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 calling them. It 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 those things and they really crank up, It just kind of jars your, you know, it just kind of jars you, that jars your innards, that sort of sound that they're making. And so we're all speaking the same language. It's just these little peculiarities around the corner of the languages that make them a little different. And as I've said, the Scots-Irish had a lot of influence on the dialect of,

especially the Upper South, the Appalachia, the Ozarks, and some of the old words that we can trace back. to our Scotch-Irish forebears, words like airish for cool or nippy. And one of my favorite terms that linguists say was brought over by the Scotch-Irish, and you can probably still hear maybe in some places in Scotland, some rural places,

is the word ill, not meaning someone who's sick, but ill meaning someone who's angry, who's upset about something. because I can remember my dad pestering my mom about being ill when I 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 it basically means the same thing it can be mean or evil or nasty or something like that and that word seeped into the language and made its way across and a lot of these are rural terms too because as I said, 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 no horns on it. That's another one of those that kind of made its way from Scott's Irish, Gaelic, you know, whatever they were bringing across. Sorry to interrupt, Dr. Blevins, excuse me. I'd like to take another question from the class. Anyone have a question? My name's Brent, and I'm from southeast Arkansas. Now, before we had supper at my grandma, she always told us to be sure and wrench our hands off,

especially if we've been cleaning a big old mess of squirrels. It was pretty clear to us, youngers, that the difference between wrench and rinse was clean her hands. Now, is that what you're talking about, professor? Young man, that was beautiful. That was beautiful. You had a very special grandmother, didn't you? Finally, a truly intelligent example of regional dialect. I have no idea why that woman said ranch instead of rants.

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, Brent. It's students like you. I don't want to get choked up here. It's students like you that make my job and Dr. Blevins job so fulfilling.

This is why we do it. Carry on, Dr. Blevins, just carry on. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest.

It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com.

you'll be glad you did and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy to use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. 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 Annie Gogling, which you may have heard or Cy Gogling. That means the same thing. Antigogling and side goggling. There's catty wampas.

My favorite is womper-jawed. In my family, it was wamper-jawed. I think it's probably more commonly wopper-jawed. And we can trace it back again to like middle and maybe even old English. The word wopper was a verb meant to oscillate or to move around erratically. Another fun word, and I think this is a pretty common word, and it has become common in the last 30 years is bumfuzzled. Bumfuzzled is a means to be confused, disoriented, something like that.

And it was almost exactly 25 years ago. It was in late October of 1999 and Bill Clinton was president. And he used the term bum fuzzled at a press conference. And he was criticizing the Republicans proposed budget for that year. and he said something like, this is going to bumfuzzle 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. Apparently it wasn't as common as it is today. But in Slate magazine, had a whole article dedicated to the president using the word bumfuzzled in a press conference. And they speculated that maybe it's a code word, that, you know, he's sending the secret messages to somebody.

But there was all this speculation on what the president was saying with bum-fuzzled. And they were, you know, this is in the very early days of the internet, so it wasn't as easy just to go, you know, look stuff up as it is today. But I'll just talk about

a few more of the rules. If you want to talk like a backwoodsman or, you know, somebody from Appalachar, the Ozards, One of the obvious ones is you take words that end in OW and turn it to ER. So you got O Yeller, you've got Wender. You wouldn't set a minnow trap around here. You'd set a minter trap.

You go walking through the metter, you know, good old feller, just any, pretty much any word. And I can even remember, you know, the soft drink mellow yellow. I can remember people calling that meller yeller when I was a kid. and this is one you'll recognize too. If you talk about using the word one after a noun, like the 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, bigan, littlein, nextin,

all those any phrase where you would end it with one you just turn it into kind of a u-in and squeeze them together and again you know going back to the anti 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 young and not as a as a child or a kid or anything like that It was usually a young. So he had Aunt B and he had Youngen. And my other favorite example of like Hollywood getting it right for a change is, is the movie Slingblade.

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, you know, the Washtals, kind of the edge of the Washtal's 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 from kind of a Scottish pronunciation of the word stub. Kind of what, you know, a scott 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, of little stobbs, a little tiny stumps. And Slingblade, the little boy was, he had this stub of a stick that he's warping the ground with.

And warping, that's another good word. You know, you've got to, if you're hitting something, 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 stobbed regularly. 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 Dole, instead of Doyle, you know, he's taking care of Dole. And he tells him to bring a Hearst.

And a Hearst, of course, in a lot of rural areas, a Hurst 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 you got to, it's a hearst instead of a hearse. It's wants instead of once. Instead of once. It's twice instead of twice.

Give me a chanced instead of a chance. And there you're doing a couple, you're turning the short A into a long A and you're sticking a tea on the, I don't know why we do that, why we put a tea on the end of a lot of words like that, but we do. And that's another one of those things that Slingblade got right. And that's why everybody should watch Slingblade.

Dr. Blevins, excuse me again, I'd like to take just one last question from the students as we celebrate all of America's regional dialects. Anyone? Thank you, Professor. Yeah, my name is Bear, and I'm from Western Arkansas. My father, grandfather, and actually as far back as we can remember, pronounce the word spelled A-C-O-R-N as Acorn, not Acorn. Is that a good example of regional dialect?

Well, well, well, haven't we saved the best comment for last young man? That was powerful. Just give me a minute here to myself. that was powerful. Thank you. Try not to get emotional, but that was raw, cultural, zeitgeist power. Go ahead, Dr. Blevins. Just carry on with your final point. Thank you. My last rule of how to talk hillbilly or how to talk Ozard, 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 sticking an A on the front of something just to kind of give it a little oomph, you know, to give it a little more power,

which is something that linguists say was brought over not by the Scots-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 also sometimes called A-prefixing. And so I can remember very vividly from my childhood people talking about, oh, their kids are running and a bucking, deer's a 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 Bob Thornton movies. But if you think of music, it's in a lot of old songs that we still have,

like the 10 days or the 12 days of Christmas. 10 lords of leaping, eight maids a milking, seven swans of swimming, six geese-a-laying. As recently as the 1700s, that would have been a pretty common thing. The old song, A Hunting We Will Go. If you remember that one from childhood, a hunting, we will go, hunting we will go, hunting we will go. There's even a segment in there. Let's see, we'll catch a bear and cut his hair and then we'll let him go.

I don't know if Bear Grease supports that kind of treatment of bears. But that's one, that's another one of those peculiar grammatical features that a lot of times, if you grew up in that dialect, you probably use and don't even realize you're using it. yeah you see what I did there and it's a you know I think it's a good thing to be comfortable with your dialect to 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 conforming to to standard English but I don't feel compelled anymore to do that and even 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 until it starts costing us money. And then it's time, you know, to talk like the guy on the evening news. Dr. Blevins, that was very informative. I remember that you had a story about going to a church.

If you don't mind, go ahead and tell us that. story. Yeah, this little church in the Arkansas Ozarks had invited me to come and speak one Sunday morning. And I'm not a preacher, and 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 tried to do that too. So I actually, I took the Adam and Eve story from the Bible, and I rendered it in basically in hillbilly language. And I'm not trying to be irreverent. This is the Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden story.

Now once upon a time in that Garden of Eden was a snake. And that snake was as smart as could be. He sidled up to this old gal and he says, look he here. They's fruit of hanging everywhere, is off in the trees and bushes in this here garden. you're telling me that the Lord said, Jens can't eat an area bite of it?

No, the gal says. I reckon we can eat airy we want, excepting that fruit on that biggin over there, right smack dab in the middle. The old master said, don't be 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 plumb full of devilment. He says, why, that ain't right. You ain't about to die. The Lord don't want you 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 at that tree that she ain't supposed to be nowhere's around, and she got to study on how larpin that fruit would be. Oh, it would be the stewed rosin. So she peeped around this away and that way. She wretch over and snatched her apple and edder a bite. Then she carried some to her feller, and he had him a little bait of it.

Soon as the both of them had gnawed off a piece and swallowed it plumbed 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 a jaybird. So the old gal rustled up a jaggle leaves off a caotope tree and hemmed them into something look like a big old night shirt. She fixed up some short breeches for the feller, it being right peculiar for men to soul. Long about dusky dark, here come the Lord of walking through the garden. and they heard him and bushed up.

The Lord hollered out. Where are you? The feller 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 ye is naked? said the Lord. I swan yon's been eating off that tree, I said, leave B, ain't you?

Then the feller says, It was this old gal you put in here with me, Lord. I know it she'd be more trouble in a wildcat and a paper poke. She brung me something to eat and I edit, seeing as how I ain't in a habit of fixing my own dinner. So the Lord says to this old gal, how come you to do such a thing? She says,

It was that drotted snake, while he bumfuzzled me so much, my mind just clabbard up. Now, you might think that snake would have high-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. cause of this here mess you made for the rest of time and creation, you're going to crawl around down on your belly all cattywampus into dirt. You and this here old gal ain't going to like each other at all. In fact, the business, her youngins is going to stomp on your youngins' heads, and your youngens is going to use piousness teeth to bite her youngins' heels. Then the Lord gave the old gal and her feller a-talking to like they ain't never heard. He said to the old gal,

you're going to get in a family way and having that young and'll hurt you a right smart. And to see to it that you're told never ceases, you're going to be stuck with this here feller what tattled on you and what can't cook or so for the rest of your life. As for you, Feller, the Lord told him, you aren't done what you did just because your wife told you to. For that, you're going to spend your life at digging in this hard, rocky ground

just to survive. You'll have to live off a poke 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 ever other infernal weed under the heavens. Your sweat will water the fields, but it's salt will pise 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. I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode.

I want to thank our distinguished guest lecture, Dr. Brooke. Blevins and all of our wonderful students. Sometimes the things that appear to be differences are actually the things that make us the same. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Greas and Brent's This Country Life podcast. Please leave us a review on iTunes and share this episode with somebody this week. We hope you have a wonderful Christmas season and keep the wild places wild. That's where the bears live. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps.

at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.

This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human. Thank you.