Sayings

I just have to follow up a post about Southern Accents with one about Southern Sayings. My friend Robin emailed me one that even I, born and raised in Georgia, have never heard: I'm going to stomp a mud hole in your ass and then walk it dry. Apparently I'm not red-neck enough!

Rob's Dad has a saying that describes a mediocre job: "Good enough for Government work." There is great disdain among my parents generation for beauracracy.

A classic Rob phrase: "Trailer Park trash people looked at her and said: Man, he married down." And also: "He/She is wasting air." He is NOT a people person.... so he says this one frequently.

My grandmother: "Pretty is as pretty does."

"The Good Lord willing and the Creek don't rise" -- I'll be there if nothing comes up. And Creek refers not to a body of water, but to the Native American tribe that lived in south Georgia when the colonist arrived almost 300 years ago.


A whole string of sayings that describe stupidity:
"Dumber than a bag of hammers."
"Not the brightest bulb on the string."
"One brick shy of a load."
"If brains were dynamite, you wouldn't have enough to blow your nose!"
"A few sandwiches shy of a picnic."

One heard among the Great Depression generation: "We didn't have a pot to pee in."

I guess so in southern: "I reckon."

Some sayings appear to appear in other cultures too: "That's about as useless as tits on a bull." (Thanks for that info Tracey).

To finish it off, a Georgia grammer rule: Ya'll is plural. It is actually a contraction of: You all. How are ya'll doing? means: How is everyone in your family. All of you. We can always tell if we are reading something written by a Yankee pretending to be a southerner if one character says to another: How ya'll doing? That is incorrect use of the term ya'll. No southerner would ask ONE person how "ya'll" doing. We'd say: You doing all right? See.... we're not as dumb as we sound. We have grammar rules. You probably can't tell that from reading MY blog... but they do exist.