Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Why we talk more gooder fastly
I can't take credit for that title, that's close to the name of a Jeff Foxworthy book. When Southerners are busy or upset, we use colloquialisms. When you need to make a point quickly, colloquialisms are very handy. Now some people have said "it's the dumbing down of our society" & yes some people never learned how to speak English properly, but this post isn't about them, so get down off your soap box. We as Southerners have our on language & there are different dialects of the Southern language as well. I didn't know there were different dialects until I went outside Texas, but was still in the South. In Texas, when we say y'all, we're talkin' 'bout more than one person. In Mississippi, at 1st I would get confused when someone said y'all to me and I was by myself. I wouldn't respond cause I thought they were talking to someone else and then the person would say "hey I'm talkin' to you", and then they would proceed w/ their question. Where y'all from? Where y'all been?, and so on. Sometimes their accents were so funny, I didn't understand them at all. But I digress, let's go back to Texas. When you have a point & it has to be made quick,or you're just using "lazy speech", white folks say they're fixin' to do something. Black folks don't have time for the "X" sound that has to be made for "fixin' so we say "finna". Now both black & white folk don't always have time for "gonna", so we say "gon". As in: "I'm gon to." I think as Southerners we feel that the less syllables we say, the more words we can say. Which also explains why every word that ends in a G, automatically has it cut off. Are you kiddin'? We don't have time for G's. Some people think there's no room for "lazy speech" in language at all, I'm not one of them. I think there's a time and a place for everything. I think it should only be used when you're w/ someone you're extremely familiar with or if you meet someone in a casual atmosphere. Southerners are a xenophobic people, so let non southerners look down on us if they want. We know we're right anyway.
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1 comment:
You are so right
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