00:00:11 Speaker 1: Good morning, students. My name is Professor Nucleman. 00:00:14 Speaker 2: 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? 00:00:29 Speaker 1: Thank you. 00:00:30 Speaker 2: 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, 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? 00:01:16 Speaker 3: 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? 00:01:24 Speaker 2: 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 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 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. 00:02:42 Speaker 1: Very interesting man. 00:02:44 Speaker 2: 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. 00:03:00 Speaker 4: 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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. 00:09:40 Speaker 2: 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 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? 00:10:25 Speaker 1: Yes, young man, with your hand up. 00:10:28 Speaker 3: 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 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 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. 00:11:21 Speaker 2: 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. 00:11:34 Speaker 5: Son. 00:11:35 Speaker 2: 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. 00:11:44 Speaker 4: 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 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 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 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 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. 00:13:32 Speaker 5: Uh. 00:13:33 Speaker 4: 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 00:16:09 Speaker 2: 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. 00:16:28 Speaker 1: Calling a sack of poke? That is hilarious? 00:16:32 Speaker 2: 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? 00:16:44 Speaker 1: Anybody? Yes, yes, you young. 00:16:46 Speaker 6: 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 some deer over there. Is that kind of what you're talking about? 00:17:12 Speaker 7: Well? 00:17:15 Speaker 2: 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 about Wisconsin. 00:17:37 Speaker 1: But let's get back to doctor Blevin's Okay. 00:17:41 Speaker 4: 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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. 00:20:12 Speaker 1: Doctor Blevins. I'd just like to interrupt for a second. 00:20:14 Speaker 2: 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. 00:20:47 Speaker 1: Who has a question, just raise. 00:20:49 Speaker 4: Your hand, professor. 00:20:51 Speaker 5: 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 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. 00:21:29 Speaker 1: Hmmm, Texas. 00:21:31 Speaker 2: 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. 00:21:52 Speaker 1: Just carry on. 00:21:54 Speaker 4: 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 00:26:35 Speaker 2: Doctr Blevin, excuse me, Let's take another question from the class again, looking for regional dialects. 00:26:44 Speaker 1: Who has a question? 00:26:47 Speaker 8: 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 you think that's true? 00:27:12 Speaker 7: Hm? 00:27:13 Speaker 1: Okay, okay, thank you. 00:27:16 Speaker 2: 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, as some parts of the country say Doctor Blevin's please just go on, just carry on. 00:27:47 Speaker 4: 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 Scott's Irish Gaelic, you know, whatever, whatever they were bringing across. 00:30:48 Speaker 2: Sorry to interrupt, Dr Blavin, excuse me. I'd like to take another question from the class. Anyone have a question. 00:30:55 Speaker 7: 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? 00:31:16 Speaker 1: That was beautiful. That was beautiful. You had a very special grandmother, didn't you. 00:31:24 Speaker 2: 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. 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. 00:31:58 Speaker 1: This is why we do it. Carry on, Doctor Blevin's just carry on. 00:32:15 Speaker 4: 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, 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 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 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. 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. 00:34:02 Speaker 5: Uh. 00:34:02 Speaker 4: 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 00:38:37 Speaker 2: 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. 00:38:46 Speaker 9: 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. 00:39:01 Speaker 1: Is that a good example of regional dialect? 00:39:04 Speaker 7: Well? 00:39:05 Speaker 2: Well, well, haven't we saved the best comment for last young man. 00:39:12 Speaker 1: That was powerful. 00:39:15 Speaker 2: 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. 00:39:31 Speaker 4: 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 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 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 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 a pretty common thing. 00:41:01 Speaker 6: Uh. 00:41:01 Speaker 4: 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 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 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 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 the evening news. 00:42:30 Speaker 2: 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. 00:42:39 Speaker 4: 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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? 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 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. 00:45:51 Speaker 5: Now. 00:45:51 Speaker 4: 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 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 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 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 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. 00:47:31 Speaker 2: 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. 00:47:46 Speaker 1: That make us the same. 00:47:47 Speaker 2: I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear, Grease and Brents this country life podcast. 00:47:52 Speaker 1: Please leave us a review on. 00:47:54 Speaker 2: iTunes, Share this episode with somebody this week. 00:47:57 Speaker 1: We hope you have a wonderful Christmas. 00:47:59 Speaker 2: Seasons cheap the wild places wild, so that's where the bears live.

Save this episode