Randy Parker

Archive for the ‘Southern words’ Category

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More expressions than you can shake a stick at

In Southern words, language, tradition, vocabulary, writing on March 31, 2009 at 4:53 am

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I grew up in a house where things were rough as a cob, the sky was clear as a bell, and there were more expressions than you could shake a stick at. But don’t call them cliches. When my dad speaks, he uses the expressions he got from his father as naturally as breathing.  They never sound tired or worn out.  In fact, when I was young I didn’t even think of them as expressions.  It was as if there were no other way to say it.

For fun, I thought I would explore a few of these, most of which seem to be American in origin.

ROUGH AS A COB

Traditionally, this is used to describe people or circumstances that affect you personally.  “That guy was rough as a cob” would mean he was abrasive, someone who rubbed you the wrong way. As far as I can remember, My dad never used it that way.  In fact, being a boater and a sailor,  he would say,  “The bay is as rough as a cob out there.” I wonder if he even knows that the expression refers to the use of corn cobs in the outhouse for personal hygiene.

FORTY-ELEVEN

If there is more of something than you care to count–say, varieties of candy at the store–then you might conclude that there are forty-eleven different kinds. George Thompson of the American Dialect Society traces the word back as far as 1836. He speculates that it might be a Black expression, but my guess is it is merely Southern.

[Cornelia Latting, a young colored woman, sentenced to 2 years, months; she tells the court] that she did not care a d–n if they had sent her up for forty-eleven years.

New York Transcript, February 15, 1836, p. 2, col. 4.

Another reference he found:

I never go into one [a toy store] without wishin’ it was Christmas once a week, and I had forty-eleven children to buy toys for.

S. Annie Frost, “The Daffodils Prepare fot a Fancy Fair,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, July, 1866, p. 52, col. 2 (Proquest’s Amer Periodicals)

It’s a little like “umpteen,” I suppose.

A BUCK THREE-EIGHTY

If your wife asks you how much that gleaming new piece of hardware for your boat cost, you might not want to tell her, so you downplay the cost as if it is inconsequential and you say, “oh, about a buck three-eighty.”

COULDN’T STIR ‘EM WITH A STICK

This is a simple one used to describe a crowd.  In other words, “thick.”  There were so many people, you couldn’t stir ‘em with a stick.  It might be people, but it could also be boats in the harbor or roaches in the motel room. Which brings us to another similar stick-related expression:

MORE THAN YOU CAN SHAKE A STICK AT

This one could just be a simple variant of “more than you can count” or more than you can point out.”  However, something about that stick shaking seems to hint at something else. Nobody knows for sure.  The best explanation I have found is in World Wide Words, an online newsletter by Michael Quinion:

Its recorded history began — at least, so far as the Oxford English Dictionary knows — in the issue of the Lancaster Journal of Pennsylvania dated 5 August 1818: “We have in Lancaster as many Taverns as you can shake a stick at”. Another early example is from Davy Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East of 1835: “This was a temperance house, and there was nothing to treat a friend that was worth shaking a stick at”. A little later, in A Book of Vagaries by James K Paulding of 1868, this appears: “The roistering barbecue fellow swore he was equal to any man you could shake a stick at”.

The modern use of the phrase always exists as part of the extended and fixed phrase “more … than you can shake a stick at”, meaning an abundance, plenty. The phrase without the “more than” element is rather older, but not by much.

Shaking a stick at somebody, of course, is a threatening gesture, or at least one of defiance. So to say that you have shaken a stick at somebody is to suggest that person is an opponent, perhaps a worthy one. The sense in the second and third quotations above seem to fit this idea: “nothing worth shaking a stick at” means nothing of value; “equal to any man you could shake a stick at” means that the speaker is equal to any man of consequence.

Where it comes from can only be conjecture. One possibility that has been put forward is that it derives from the counting of farm animals, which one might do by pointing one’s stick at each in turn. So having more than one can shake one’s stick at, or tally, would imply a great number. This doesn’t fit the early examples, though, which don’t have any idea of counting about them. Another idea is that it comes from battle, in which one might shake a stick at one’s vanquished enemy. This could possibly have led into the early usages.

Following publication of this piece in the World Wide Words newsletter, Suzan Hendren and Sherwin Cogan suggested that it might have come from the Native American practice of counting coup, in which merit was gained by touching a vanquished enemy in battle. In that case, “too many to shake a stick at” might indicate a surplus of fallen enemies, and “not worth shaking a stick at” would equate a person with “an enemy who is so cowardly or worthless that there is no merit to be gained from counting coup on him”, as Sherwin Cogan put it. An intriguing idea, but there’s no evidence that I know of.

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FAIR TO MIDDLIN’

Both “fair” and “middling” are cotton classing terms.  Cotton has to be classed according to quality, and these classes are rather average. So if somebody asks, “How are you,” and you say “fair to middlin’” (the “g” is dropped in the South), you are basically saying “could be better, could be worse.”

CLEAR AS A BELL

No doubt, this simile originally would have been used to describe a pure, resonating sound.  The radio station came in clear as a bell. That makes sense. But somewhere along the line, someone decided that the sky was clear as a bell.  For me, this is no longer a simple comparison; it is poetry. Describing how something looks by comparing it to to how something else sounds–that’s awesome.

Sure you’ve heard it over and over.  Believe me, I’ve heard it at least 100,000 times. “It’s clear as a bell, not a cloud in the sky.”  But it still resonates for me, makes the sky seem deeper somehow. And I think that the idea of the sky as a dome helps with the bell analogy. If God were to flick it with his finger it would ring mighty and true.  I wonder who first used the phrase in this way.

The O.E.D. devotes almost four pages to the word “clear.” There I found a line of Dickens (from Oliver Twist): “Real, fresh, genuine port-wine . . . clear as a bell, and no sediment.”  Not about the sky, of course, but the same wonderful mixing of the senses.

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Scholars fixin’ to publish regional dictionary

In Publishing, Southern words, language, vocabulary, writing on March 24, 2009 at 4:25 am

The final volume of the Dictionary of Regional English (S-Z)  is almost ready for publication. Check out the story here. I’ll be interested in what it says about “tump.”

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Wordcracker: Tump

In Southern words, Wordcracker, language, vocabulary on February 21, 2009 at 4:37 pm

If you are from the southern U.S., you may know of or actually use the verb tump. Perhaps your children use it. You won’t find it in all dictionaries, but it is a word all the same. I grew up using the word. Heck, I still use it. What does it mean? First of all, don’t waste your time with the Oxford English Dictionary. There, a tump is a clump or mound and a tump-line is a strap used by people carrying large loads on their back. It goes across the forehead to help them better manage the load. (My O.E.D. is old; perhaps it has been amended.)

On the web, you’ll find a lot of incomplete answers. A site I like, Word Detective, has an entry about it, and although the writer finally touches on the actual meaning, he still seems to be scratching his head. The online dictionary Encarta says it means to overturn; to knock over. This is an unacceptable oversimplification.

Although a bit of a mystery for even the experts, it’s clear to me that tump is a combination of the words tip and dump. I have also seen theories that it is a combination of turn and dump. If I were writing my own dictionary, my definition would be something along the lines of:

Tumping is a violent or consequential tipping over of something.

That consequence is usually something being spilled or dumped. So although a kid might merely tip over his empty glass, he would tump it over if it had milk in it. You might tip over an upright domino, but you would tump over a kid on his tricycle.

You could tip over a kid on his bike or even knock him over, but there’s the chance that he could catch himself with his foot. Tump him over and can’t you just hear his little body thump against the sidewalk?

You might also tump over anything that is big or heavy, whether anything is actually spilled or not. For example, you might tip over a toy, but you would tump over the wheelbarrow to check a tire.

Sure you can turn over a wheelbarrow. But to me that requires a certain amount of control. A more careful deliberate action. Tump over a wheel barrow and you get the gravity of it. Less control, more weight. When you put down anything particularly heavy or big, there is a certain amount of dumping going on, isn’t there, the not-so-careful placing of the object because, well, because it is big and heavy. Dump those boxes over there, we might say.

What self-respecting, high-flying Southerner hasn’t tumped a swing set over?

Also, tumping can just happen. A wheelbarrow can suddenly tump over because it is loaded poorly. Nobody actually has to knock it over.

I love words and phrases like tump over and fixing to because they seem to fill a void left by our “proper” vocabulary. They uniquely express something that no other word or phrase quite gets right.

Although I love the word, I could never use “tump” in my professional writing. Not because it is slang. I’m not so sure it is. But, obviously, it is not universal enough and, as a result, sounds uneducated, even rednecked.

I come by it honestly, though. When I was little, my mother, who is of Scottish stock, called a thing with stripes on it “stri-ped.” She has since reformed. But this is an Elizabethan pronunciation that still lives in parts of Appalachia where many Scotch-Irish settled, and apparently to some extent in other parts of the South (my mom is from Memphis). For years I said stri-ped, too. As in, “Mama, can I have s’more ice-tea and a paper tow’l; I just tumped over my strip-ed Dixie cup.”

Man, have I come a long way. Now I tump over my Chardonnay.