Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related Badfic fake Southern Idioms

I've been mostly off the boards for the last couple of months, getting ready for school to begin. I haven't read a little bitty bit of this thread since the last time I posted.

As for the Southernism, I was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin--not exactly Southern. I feel that if I, a Northerner, could notice how poorly they wrote the Southern stuff it must be pretty noticeable.

There was a definitive drawl where I went to college and phrases like "y'all" (I still use that one a lot) and "fixin' to" were commonplace, despite the Northerly latitude (or is that longitude?). Anywho, I was told that the accent wasn't a Southern drawl but a "river drawl." I "axed" about it, but nobody could tell me why river towns would have a different set of accents and sayings. That'll learn me to axe a stupid question.


Elisabeth

"I like to have fell off'n my chair readin' this here thread."

To some, that sounds like it's lifted from an old Beverly Hillbillies script, but it's the type of thing that a Southerner - especially one from the Southeast - might say. And my favorite Texasism is probably "He's all hat and no cattle."

First Yankee who can translate that one wins a no-prize!

Terry, I just heard that this weekend on "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys." She was addressing a rodeo cowboy, and she was talking about his inability to make a commitment. I thought it meant he was a fraud (a pretend man, so to speak, who couldn't come through with the goods when it really mattered).

Back to Elisabeth's first list of madeup Southernisms: I think Imay have heard the positive version of that one: He's happier 'n a puppy with two tails. That kind of sounds like Jeff Foxworthy.

I always find this kind of discussion amusing because my perspective is that of a real Southerner, i.e., someone (originally) from the Southern Hemisphere, even if I live in the other half of the world (you know, where they have the seasons backwards) these days.

When I was a kid, I used to find things like the anthropomorphic drawings of the winds that were found in comics to be very weird: the South wind was usually a "Southern" belle, drawl and fake dialect and all, which was just plain odd to someone who's felt the winter wind "straight off the Antarctic"; and the North wind was worse, all ice and snow gear, when I was used to "hot Northerlys" that could make summer days almost unbearable (not to mention the occasional dust storms they brought -- ever seen a dark red cloud blot out huge swathes of the sky over a city?).

Mind you, the Poms are worse, what with their obsession with naming parts of England -- they even put it on road signs: "The North", "The South", "The South-West" and so on (we shall pass over the Scots who, of course, are further north than all the English ). And they use it as a reason to squabble; I've squelched more than one pointless argument by interjecting (after thickening my natural accent), "Well, from where I sit, you're all bloody Northeners anyway!" By the time they recover from the blasphemy, they've generally forgotten what they were arguing about in the first place. :rolleyes:

Oh, and "opossums" are so named to distinguish them from Australasian possums. It may also be a sign of the (in-?)famous courtly "Southern" manners that they are Opossums rather than what their southern cousins are generally referred to as, namely "Bloodypossums!"

Phil

lol
this is of course due to the fact that they are different species...
with OPOSSUMS being rodents, and POSSUMS being marsupials...


and your comments on the NORTH winds reminds me of another curiosity that I found when reading....
before I knew better I always wondered about birds flying SOUTH for the winter.... why on earth would they want to go south to the Antarctic in the winter... and then to bloody Queensland for the Summer?

Opossums are also marsupials and pretty neat, even if they are ugly. They are resistant to rabies. Their babies emerge from the womb at 13 days gestation and then crawl into the pouch where they connect to really long nipples for the next 70 and 125 days. And of course, there's the "playing dead". I worked with Dr. William Krause for a while and he studies opossums, so I had to learn to look at them as something other than roadkill. http://web.missouri.edu/~krausew/Histology/Home.html . Boy, are we way off-topic!

I thought so as well!

I live in an urban setting in central Canada and I use y'all everyonce in a while. i don't really here that here in the city.

As for 'row' (r-ow) only my grandparents use it who are from England. I use it from time to time and pple know what I mean here.

My mum-in-law spent some time with some pple from the States (I don't what area). She kept saying they said "you all" and I said no it's "y'all". I can't recall what area, if any, says it "you ll". (Maybe she said Chicago, which I do realize isn't part of the south.) We kept asking her to repeat the phrase because she was says it was really...in an amusing fashon and slow and thinking she had it bang on. It was far from it. I guess you had to be there.

I've always wanted to explore the southern USA.