I’ll put this here:
Admittedly, for the longest time as a kid, I never knew the phrase meant “chest of drawers”. Likewise, I used to hear “all intensive purposes” instead intents and purposes, chiefly because of how folks down this way pronounced it.
What’re some other misheard, mispronounced terms you’ve commonly heard in the south, or, what’s something that we say – like Coke for anything that counts as a soda – that’s uniquely regional?
Have at it in the comments.
Growing up, whenever I would be talking to Mama about something I was considering, if she didn’t like the idea, she would always say, “I’d be ‘jupitus’ about that”. Never have figured out exactly where that came from, but I knew exactly what it meant. If I questioned her about a word she used, she would always give me a look like…I should have never sent your ass to college. 😁
Georgia super fan and recruiting expert weighs in:
https://youtu.be/OHnFheqTTdg?si=qMSy9b_jX98n43B9
Fixin’ to
I’ve argued with lots of Yankees that this is grammatically correct. “Fix” is synonymous with “prepare”, so it is the same as saying “I am preparing to kick your ass.”
That’s like the joke/story I heard about a Yankee giving some nice lady a hard time about “yonder”, wondering where that was. She said if she pulled a gun and told him to get his ass “over yonder” he’d find it in a hurry.
Personally, I think the southern referencing of all soft drinks as “cokes” is fading away (except in Hollywood, which can’t get much of anything about the South correct due to some yankeefied caricatures).
If you order a coke nowadays, you’ll get a coke, not “what kind of coke do you want?”
Unless they say, “We have Pepsi, is that OK?”…to which the proper response is, “I’ll have a Dr. Pepper.” “How about Mr. Pibb?” “Close enough.”
I have heard RC Cola referred to as an “Arrah-see Co-cola”. Come to think of it, it may have been Ray Stevens.
The first time I heard a coke referred to as “pop” was on a family trip to St. Louis. I preferred my older cousin’s version of pop, which meant cold beers. He also referred to parties and other get-togethers as”kicks”. If you were to say to a Yankee,”let’s go down to the kick and have a few pops”, they would probably get all tingly and very excited about the oncoming sugar rush (which is probably why they talk too fast) , until they got to the kick and discover that “a few pops” meant “most of a case of beer” per attendee. (Wisconsin fans would take this in stride, however. Say what you will about the land of cheese, but those jokers can drink some beer).
I grew up in Atlanta and have lived in the South all my life (well, except for now living in Texas). I’ve never met anyone that referred to all soft drinks as “Coke”. Granted, that’s because most people only drank Coke and avoided all the other soft drinks.
I think that’s another lazy myth propagated by Yankees trying to make Southerners look uneducated.
No, this one check out. When I worked in the trading post at the local Boy’s Scout camp in the summer we had one of those old pull tap fountains for Cokes. We had Cokes, Sprite, Grape, and Orange. Lots of kids from up here in NWGA would ask for the grape Cokes or Orange Cokes.
I should point out that this was in the 70’s.
I always referred to any carbonate d drink as a coke. Even if getting a Dr Pepper or Orange Crush or whatever it would be let’s go get a coke.
An RC in a glass bottle and a sleeve of Lance salted peanuts made for a great day at the pond. Hard to beat.
Add a moonpie!
Gimme a R-Ah-See cola and a moonpie. Big combo back in the day. I always loved a Mountain Dew and a honey bun. The old timers would pour a sleeve of Lance or Tom’s peanuts in their Co-Cola. The small bottle of course, the bigger bottle didn’t taste the same, or so everyone said.
The Lance “Orange” & Peanut Butter crackers were also a good choice. I won’t say “cheese” because there’s nothing resembling natural cheese anywhere in that recipe, but hey, I’m still alive…
great combo
In a formerly rural county which is now a part of the Atlanta MSA, the old timers referred to a coke as a dope. Had to do with the original receipe.
Except now there actually are a LOT of different Cokes.
Fish bait – minnas or really redneck – minners
Crickets, time tested and true unless you’re fishing crappie and it seemed minnas were the only way to go. When we’d fish the Okefenokee we would buy a small cup of “sand maggots” that apparently were hatched out of the stems of the Lilly pads down there, or so they told us. You could catch the darkest, fattest bream out of there you’d ever seen. Never mind the floating alligator making its way to the boat because of the splashing. Used telescoping synthetic cane poles to drop the little buggers right in the thick of the Lilly pads wherever a space would be. Fond memories. Also somewhat scary as hell.
Yassuh, crickets were the ticket. Daddy’s sales at his marina on Lake Blackshear of crickets, red and white wigglers, minners, and shiners slowed way down when the Mayflies hatched out. We would wear out the bream with them. My fishing buddy, an old retired railroad guy, would freeze them in a paper bag and we would catch ‘Titty’ bream with them year round. Fond memories.
I imagine I’ve been to your daddy’s place. Blackshear or “the river” is harder to fish than it looks…much like Seminole, it looks like you ought to catch a 10 pound bass on every cast, but that is just not the case!
I finished my last 10 years of my career in south central rural Kentucky and learned a whole new language. I was a General Manager of a prominent business unit. The first day I was there I asked my administrative assistant to get me a file. She said “I don’t care to do that for you”. I was dumbfounded. Little did I know that she was telling me she’d gladly do it.
Others :
Scrambled hamburgers = sloppy Joe’s
Dry land fish = fried local mushrooms
You uns = y’all
Those were the best
Aladawg
You uns is used in Pittsburgh a lot.
One of our “teachers” in high school… y’all know the type, the assistant DBs coach who also taught history… used to talk about going to the “skoo liberry” to get books. His son was my best friend and I’d go over to their house after skoo to swim in their “pooh”.
It’s a moo point.
I have heard mute point
Yeah, that one always gets me. I wish it was mute. But I guess the argument is moot these days. 😉
Or if your are from Canada “you can go oot and aboot and walk your moot.”
A sports forum favorite: “Nobody in the locker room can stand him because he’s such a pre-Madonna.”
Pre-Madonna is getting to be a looooooong time ago, now…
My dad always mispronounced “I’m proud of you” by saying, “that boy is eat up with quit” 🧐
Question: wuh-tull-ya have?
Response: FO, three hot dogs sideways, and two neck-ed dogs walkin’
“supposably” When I worked at a DQ in high school, many people would order ice cream combs.
It’s not a tissue. It’s a Kleenex.
F”uh”ther.
Used to reference distance. As in, “Not there, go down a little futher.”
Growing up I would be spending the night at my gram-ma and grandaddy’s house. At night I would her gram-ma while they were in the bed say, “damn Curtiss – get fuhther”. Me and my brother still laugh about that.
Any type of sneakers were referred to as “tennis shoes” back in the day….
Y’all, of course, can be singular or plural though all y’all is preferred when there’s a crowd. Bless your heart is not a compliment. If I had my druthers, hankering, might could, and fixin’ are self explanatory. As are carry me to, and cattywampus. As far as Coke. I certainly want a red, classic Coke when I ask for a Coke but I do use Coke to refer to any soft drink. I know a lot of other people who do as well. I think a great deal of unique southern colloquialisms are fading from use because several generations of southerners have been raised by parents who were raised outside of the south. It’s generally easy to identify southerners who were raised by parents who were born and raised in the south and southerners from small towns in casual conversations and correspondence.
If you were born in Georgia but raised by yankee interlopers then I do not consider you a Southerner. ATlanner is eat slap up with’em!!
“Sorry as owl shit” I thought for the longest time was “Al shit.” I don’t know who Al was supposed to be or why his shit was special, but that’s what I thought people were saying. – PDawg30577
This is great. Also need a separate post for misconstrued song titles or refrains!
Someone referenced “minners” above…I christened my little pond skiff “The Minner” in honor of the way my grandparents pronounced our favorite crappie bait. Some folks in South Georgia call crappie “white perch” & some folks on the coast call Reds “spot tail bass” or just plain bass. I’ve also heard old folks call largemouth bass “trout”. We also used to bream fish with “wigghlas” (red wigglers) as in “gimme a box of them wigghlas” & the “box” was actually a little blue plastic container.
One of the all time classics however is about the old Southern lady who called her old yard man of 30 something years “Bamanitius” his entire career because the first time the gentleman introduced himself the lady asked him “what shall I call you sir” & he politely answered “by my initials mam”! True story!!
Another great Southern colloquial term is “trampeded”; a combination of trampled & stampeded as in “I bout got my ass trampeded in the tunnel at Jordan-Hare stadium…”.
I could go on for hours!
I’ll make that next Tuesday’s Roundtable topic…the song lyrics one. That’ll be a good one!
Oh, that’s a good one. A girl I went to HS with thought the INXS song “Suicide Blonde” was actually “Soup & Salad Bar.” I’ve never been able to un-hear it since.
Actually the one about fish is a good one too. Heard bream, shell cracker, slab, sunfish, bluegill and they were all referring to what I thought was the same damned fish. Used to head up to Sandy Creek when my parents lived in Athens and caught the hell out of what my dad called a “warmouth” which I guess is the result of a bluegill breeding with a bass or maybe a crappie? I don’t know but they were odd looking to say the least.
JP. They are actually a species of their own. I read not long ago on GON someone caught one that broke the previous State record.
They are all from the sunfish family. We also have Stump Knockers in our GA creeks. In upstate NY they have one called a Pumpkin Seed. Each are all different in some way or another.
We called em Speckled perch or Specs when I was growing up in Thomasville. Moved up to Albany and they call em crappie. Never could understand that.
A “wahmouth” perch is a bad sonofagun…looks like a tiny snapper/bream/smallmouth bass cross but it is in fact its own species! Fight like hell too!
One time when we are the Okefenokee we walked down the Suwanee Sill and caught bowfin. Those guys are like catching Mike Tyson on an ultra lite set up. That scarred me for life because when we went to walk back, gators were on the path sunning in the evening sun. First time I realized that they run from you when they see you, they scattered but lay in the water by the path looking at you. Terrifying but you felt like Paul Bunyan when you made it back to the car.
I once buzzedly smacked a 7 footish alligator on the snout with a short piece of conduit ’cause he was blocking the road and did not respond to vocal commands. Don’t ever, ever do this…
Our high school valedictorian used to say “Pacific” in place of “specific.” It made my eye twitch.
Also, folks say, “All of the sudden,” instead of “All of a sudden.”
Don’t think this is so much a southern thing, but “Irregardless” makes my skin crawl…
along the same lines as “I could care less”
‘Laxadaisical’
Combine 2 words and f*ck up both of them.
If you really think calling all soft drinks Cokes is just a myth you must be from Atlanta. Some of y’all need to get out to the real Georgia now and then.
I lived in north Georgia, south Georgia and middle Georgia. Never heard it. This was over a period of ~25 years from the 60’s into the 90’s.
Weird. Been hearing it all my life.
Same
Maybe it’s because I usually only drank Coke, so when I said Coke, I meant Coke. I guess I assumed others were the same, and just changed their minds last minute if they then drank a Sprite.
I’m obviously in the minority here so I guess I just wasn’t paying attention.
I still remember having my mind blown when someone told me to dump my peanuts into my Coke bottle. Heavenly.
One thing I notice falling out if use is “over” “up” and “down” when talking about going to another town or county nearby. All my life (I’m forty seven) if it was east or west you said over. “I’m goin over to Preston.” If it was north it was up and south it was down. This is another thing the Yankees transplants and Atlanta folks (but I repeat myself) have ruined and replaced with their own irritating substitute. Now people are starting to say “out”. “I have to go out to Richland.” Just freakin shoot me.
I would but you ain’t worth the bullet
Why Miss Scahlet I nevah.
“Licenses” and “scales”. And of course Co-Cola.
“Ya got ta git da far fum da bat tree ta dish here war ratcheer.l
I’m still looking for that elusive Shiffa Robe!
My great grandmother used this all the time…sounds more like an article of clothing than furniture