Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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APRIL 30 - MAY 6, 2014 UCW 5 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM I have a new book, and I am loving it. It is all about two of my favorite topics, the English language and the American South, specifically our own North Carolina. Talkin' Tar Heel confirms what I have believed since I was just past being a "knee baby"— look that one up! — that North Carolina is a special place with rich and diverse dialects both old and new. My beloved grandmother, Gobbie, lived all her life in the small eastern North Carolina town of Kinston. As a young child I recognized that she used words in ways my own parents did not, even though they, too, spent their lives in the eastern part of our state. If she intended to do something in the near future, she would say she would do it "directly" or "presently." Instead of saying "thank you" for a small kindness, she just as often said "much obliged." When her grandchildren were "cutting up," she would call us "little scalawags," and once when a whopper managed to pass my young lips, her immediate response was, "Margaret Dawson, don't you dare tell me a teewaddie!" That is a word I can find in no dictionary and which drives spell check crazy, but one which all seven grandchildren clearly understood to mean a lie. Talkin' Tar Heel, authored by North Carolina State University English professors Walt Wolfram and Jeffrey Reaser, is the latest of several books to emerge from a special language research project at N.C. State that for two decades has been looking at what makes the English spoken across our state by all sorts of people unique. Wolfram jokes that his move to North Carolina in 1992 was like "dying and going to dialect heaven." One reason I love this book is that it addresses the lurking unease many of us have that monolithic media speak — no accent, no dialect, everyone sounding like a radio announcer — will eventually wipe out all our regional differences, and we will all sound alike. Not so, say professors Wolfram and Reaser, to my great relief! Hearing standardized language in the media does not mean we begin to speak it ourselves, the professors say. Dialects are alive and well in North Carolina, including Outer Banks English (Hoi Toide), Southern Highlands speech of the mountains (Hillbilly), Lumbee speech (with similarities to both Outer Banks English and mountain speech), ethnic dialects and emerging English dialects among Latinos. In addition, there are differences between urban and rural areas, probably more pronounced as more and more people from other places move mainly into North Carolina cities. Native Tar Heels, including this one, are fiercely proud of our heritage and take every opportunity to say so. The most famous example of this pride may be the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's athletic fight song lyrics, "I'm a Tar Heel born and a Tar Heel bred, and when I die, I'm a Tar Heel dead!" We take pride in knowing how to pronounce our unique place names and use them to screen newcomers from natives. Wolfram and Reaser give several examples of this pronouncing screen, and it is fair to suspect that not many folks from somewhere else can correctly pronounce Pasquotank, Tuckasegee, Corolla, Kerr Lake, Chicamacomico, Cabarrus, Uwaharrie and Saxapahaw, much less tell you where these places are. Talkin' Tar Heel is a work of serious scholarship, but my favorite part may be the Index of Dialect Words and Phrases. Some I grew up with but had no idea they were part of our dialect, and some I had never heard before. Here are a few I love: airish (cool, breezy. One of the Precious Jewels uses "sporty" to mean the same), Bless your heart (one of the most useful phrases I know. It can be kind and loving and downright snide.), buddyrow (a good friend, one of my father's oft used words), chunk (throw), favor (resemble, as in she favors her mother), flat or flat-out (completely), idn't (isn't), might could (may be able to but not committing), pocketbook (purse), poke (a paper sack. Remember pig in a poke?), reckon (suppose), recollect (remember), swanny (swear, as in "I swanny.") and everyone's favorite, y'all (the plural form of you.) "Teewaddie" apparently did not make the cut for the book. Years ago, I heard a wonderful story about a newcomer to North Carolina who was asked whether she were a native of our state. "No," she sighed, "but I got here as quickly as I could." Amen! I Don't Want to Sound Like My Automated Answering Machine by MARGARET DICKSON MARGARET DICKSON, Contributing Writer, COMMENTS? Editor@upandcom- ingweekly.com.. 910.484.6200. THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET Contest&RequestLine: 910-764-1073 www.christian107.com KeepingtheMainThing...theMainThing. visitusonline FocusontheFamily 20Countdown Magazine Adventures in Odyssey Serving Fayetteville Over 50 Years! 484-0261 1304 Morganton Rd. Mon-Sat: 6am-10pm Sun: 7am-2:30pm Celebrate Mother's Day Sirloin Steak with Salad and Baked Potato $11.95 Banquet rooms available up to 100 guests