Darn tootin'. Well slap my grandma & call me Jimmy.
Ain't nobody talk like that. I swear to God, in my 21 years of living here, I have never heard somebody talk like that.
and today I'm here to teach you how we do talk.
I'm a southerner born & raised, I was born in Memphis, Tennessee and I grew up there
for 11 years, and now I have lived in Florida for the last 10 or so.
So I would say I'm a pretty seasoned southerner,
I'm aware of all the euphemisms, the slangs, the accents, contractions, all of it.
I feel like I don't have any one accent or dialect in particular because
I've lived in 2 different regions, so I feel like I'm the best ambassador for the south because I've had family that lives
all over, I've lived in 2 different states, and
I don't have bias because I'm not just clinging to one state, you know?
but the Southern accent and the southern dialect in general gets a very bad rap
you know? It has a reputation for sounding unintelligent,
or being more comical than anything else instead of revered and respected.
Today I would like to change that. Today I'm gonna be teaching you guys
some of my favorite sayings, some of the verbs that we use,
slang from my hometown, which I think is the most exciting part.
But first I wanted to talk about today's sponsor which is HelloTalk, where you could easily
learn some southern slang. So I know a lot of you guys in the language community already use this, I'd be surprised if you didnt.
But HelloTalk is the world's largest language learning community online,
they have over 20 million users from 200+ countries, so that's like..
that's pretty big. What the platform is is that it basically connects users learning different languages to do an exchange.
They have like over 150 languages, whether it's Spanish or Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, German, anything.
Well not anything. If you're trying to learn Yugoslavian Sign Language it might be tricky.
But basically, you get matched with language learning partners for free, so I dunno how you could complain about that.
So at the top of your profile, you can see the languages you're proficient in & the ones youre learning, so you
guys see I have English, Portuguese, I'm... learning German twice?
Something's wrong there, I gotta fix that. But you guys can basically see I'm involving a lot of Portuguese & German
and Spanish on my hull-Hellotalk as of late. So this shows people the languages you're down to exchange and the ones you might be able to help them with.
And something that's also really cool is the self-introduction. So you can just put a written bio,
but you can also put an audio to introduce yourself and let people know what your voice sounds like, because naturally
a lot of people use HelloTalk to find call partners and stuff like that, so
it's like you get to know somebody before you actually have to talk to them.
It's kind of like Facebook in that you can make posts called Moments, which are like
just text, audio, picture
different stuff like that just to post like "Hey, this is my life," or you could
post specific progress about the language, and you can also get corrections.
So people in the comments can cross out things that you wrote,
and put what's actually correct. I find it really useful, this is what I use HelloTalk for
about 70 to 80% of the time.
Aside from just posting, you can also chat. What makes this app cool in terms of its technical features is that if you
long click on a message when you're chatting with somebody, you can translate it,
you can transliterate it to change it from a different writing system into a romanization,
or vice versa. And you can give each other corrections in the chat without it being weird,
y'know? Cause everyone knows we're here to learn a language, so there's no weird "Oh, I don't want any corrections"
or any of that. Everybody loves corrections, and that's why everybody's using the app in the first place, you know?
HelloTalk has been really useful for when I studied Mandarin and when I was trying to get corrections for Portuguese.
There's a ton of Chinese people on the app and there's a ton of Brazilian people on the app, so.
I cannot express how helpful it's been for getting corrections and making sure
that everything's okay, not feeling like I'm bugging my Brazilian friends or my Chinese friends
every 5 seconds because I can just go to the app.
So anyways, check it out, I will leave a link in the description, and let's get back to the video.
So first, talking about southern verbs. I feel like we have some verbs that are not really used
in other parts of the US, and I'm not sure why becaue they're so fun.
So the first one is "cut up". So when I was growing up in elementary school I heard this a whole lot, yknow
when people were misbehaving or acting bad in general,
so my teachers would always be like "Yall need to stop cutting up or else you're not going outside for recess."
I remember this one time in kindergarten I was really bad one day,
So my teacher wrote a slip that I had to give to my mom that basically informed her that I was being a little shit,
and she circled the "U" for unacceptable, and you were supposed to write a reason under it. She wrote:
"was cutting up in class".
So general, but it's all you need to know. I feel that this is generally more used with kids, but still.
I think it's super fun. Next one is "to stay". Stay is a
pretty basic word, I would say this is an A1 level word, but sometimes we use this to mean "to live".
So people will be like "where do you stay at?" it just means where do you reside, in what
area, in what type of neighborhood. and the funny thing in particular about the phrase "Where do you stay AT" is that the word "at" is so unnecessary.
That just makes me laugh for some reason because you could just ask "where do you stay" or "where do you live"
but we're like "Hey, emphasis: where do you stay AT?"
And the person will respond like "I stay by Lakewood" or "I stay by the lake".
And the last thing for verbs, I hear this from my family in Kentucky alllll the time,
is "to fix" when we're talking about food.
We'll be like "I'm bout to fix lunch" or even more southern is "I'm bout to fix supper".
Supper is another word for dinner. I would just say I'm about to make dinner, but
they always say like "Ohp, it's gettin' bout time to fix supper."
Gettin' bout time to fix supper is probably the most southern sentence I could imagine.
Food just tastes better when you call it supper. I have no idea why, it's science.
Which, this word is really interesting because I don't think any other region in the US calls it that except for the south.
Which makes me want to mention that they also say this in the UK, they'll say "What are we going to have for supper?"
And there's a lot of phrases in the south that aren't used anywhere else in the US, but rather the UK.
Also, the word "reckon". In the south, it wouldn't be uncommon to hear the phrase "Do you reckon she's gonna come home tonight?"
And in the UK they say this as well. Let me think of a really British sentence to use as an example.
"Do you reckon it's time for tea?" it's really interesting because there's a lot of things, like,
British-English-wise that have stuck more in the south than in the North, which is surprising to me because they landed
in the north, that's why it's called "New England", and they've generally had more of a cultural permanence there than in the south.
But linguistically, sometimes I feel we have a lot in common with the UK.
Oh my god, before we move on, something just occurred to me that I hear from my family in Kentucky sometimes.
"Clamdiggers". I remember one time I showed up to my aunties house wearing capris.
Capris are pants that go just below the knee or mid calf. And you know what she said to me?
"I like your clam diggers" I said WHAT is that.
Cause when you go digging for clams or fishing in general, you're gonna need some pants that you can roll up so they don't get wet.
And incidentally capris are the best pants for that, so naturally they get called "clam diggers". If you look up clam diggers,
on Google you'll find the Wikipedia page for capris.
And I don't even wear capris that often so I don't get the chance to say this, but I'm considering it so I can be like "Hey. I'm wearing my clam diggers today."
Anyways, we're gonna move on from verbs into some sayings. Because growing up with a southern mom
means that she's always giving you these weird prophecy sayings to teach you a lesson, so I've gotten a lot of them over the time.
So the first one is "till the cows come home". We use this to talk about things that are unlikely, or
that are gonna take a long time. So if I say "Oh my gosh, I'm gonna be working till the cows come home" it's like "I do not see an end to this activity."
Because I don't know if you guys have ever seen a cow physically, but they are slow animals and they are very hard to herd.
so getting all of the cows in one place to take them home takes a shit ton of time.
So naturally we made a saying out of it. Oh my gosh, I remember hearing this from my mom all the time when I was little. She was like "Oh my gosh, the cows are gonna get home before your sister does."
The next one is "well i'll be". [musically] Well I'll be! People say it with that cadence every time.
So when you can't believe something you'll be like 'Well I'll be!'. I'm pretty sure it comes from "Well I'll be damned", but we shortened it down to well I'll be.
And like I said, this can be used to express disbelief, or maybe if you wanna like show somebody you don't really
believe what they're saying or insinuate that they're lying, you can be like "Hmm, well i'll be, I didn't know that."
We are a very shady people, if you hadn't noticed. Now next, as I was coming up with things to put in this video, I
realized that a lot of the saying I wanted to put in had to do with lying.
And that makes a cultural reference because I think the southerners are very, very...
augh, how do I-- we do not like liars. We do not like people that don't carry through on their word,
we don't like people that don't keep promises, and we just don't like liars in general.
So naturally we have a ton of phrases and sayings to compensate for it, because you know, who likes a liar?
So the first one is "telling stories". I would hear this all the time growing up, people would be like "Oh my god, she loves to tell stories" or like
she loves to fabricate things. When you're accusing somebody, you're like "Oooo, you are telling stories."
Like if you know someone is lying to you. This is also great for compulsive liars who like to lie just because.
Then we have "to lie on someone", and I'm not talking about physically lying on someone, I'm talking about
implicating somebody else in your lie or making up a story about somebody.
So if I'm like "I'm not the one that finished the jar of peanut butter, it was her." Stop lying on me!
It's a despicable thing to lie on somebody because like, you can lie by yourself but why you gotta bring me into it?
I remember I laughed so hard watching the R. Kelly interview with Gayle King where, you know, he has all of these
r*pe and abuse accusations and he's just like "...They're lying on me."
Gayle: "You're saying that everything they said about you in that documentary is untrue." --R. Kelly: "They are lying on me."
So they're lying on you, that's your explanation is that they're lying on you? --Absolutely.
I screamed when I saw that because to say "to lie on somebody" makes it seem like it's such a light topic matter,
like finishing the jar of peanut butter, not having 5, 10, 15 r*pe accusations.
USE YOUR COMMON SENSE!
It's worth mentioning that R. Kelly isn't from the south, I'm pretty sure he's from Chicago, but that also brings to mind the fact that there's a lot of overlap between general southern
U.S. English and AAVE. I'm pretty sure over time we've had a larger population of
Black people in the south, so I'm pretty sure whatever transferred over just transferred over. I grew up in a city
with a larger Black population than anything else. So when you grow up and you hear those things, you don't realize that that's what it is,
so if you're surrounded by certain people you just say it as well. It's an interesting topic when we talk about appropriation
of AAVE because there's people who just adopt trendy words, and then there's people who aren't Black
but have grown up in regions like that. But I digress, y'all can do that research on your own, I just wanted to drop that right there.
Now the next one is not a general southern saying, but my mom used to say it so I feel like she got it from somebody else.
It's "a lie from the pit of the devil", and this is so southern for 2 reasons. The first is that southerners always wanna put the devil into everything.
R Kelly: They was describing Lucifer, but I'm not a devil.
For example, if it's raining while the sun is shining, most people just call that sunshower like I do myself,
but some people call that "the devil beating his wife. (???) I don't know, I feel like the south is generally more religious, like there's a lot of Christian and Catholic
people down here, so naturally the devil just makes his way into all our proverbs and everything.
The second reason it's so southern is that she would always say it with this really jumpy cadence, like "Oooooh, that is a LIEEEE from the PIT of the Devil!"
That is exaggerated by the way. My mom does not talk like that, but I feel like when she's mad, her accent comes out so much more.
She just made it so much more exaggerated. So if I was looking straight at my mom and told her a lie, she'd just...
....that is a lie from the pit of the devil.
Like that is a lie and you know it. That's the worst accusation you can get from your southern parent.
Now we're gonna move on to some slangs that are specific to my city, as I mentioned at the beginning of the video I grew up in Memphis, TN. Now...
When I said I wasn't biased, I'm a little biased because I think our slang is some of the best slang in the whole south.
I know it's Memphian because I've never heard it anywhere else other than Memphis, so.
The first one is to cone. Cone can be a verb, like if you cone something, but it can also be a noun. You can call somebody a cone.
And the meaning, I had a really hard time coming up with a single definition for this, but it means
to take advantage of something that's free in a despicable way.
There's a negative connotation. So for example if you're at the bank and you see the little courtesy station with like,
the shitty coffee, the sugar packets, the creamers, all of that, and you take all of the sugar packets and you take them home,
you're not necessarily committing a crime because you're not stealing, but you're being inconsiderate by taking all of them yourself to take home.
And the super-cone thing to do is to take the sugar packets and pour them into your bag of sugar at home so you don't have to spend $1.29 at the store, you know what I mean?
So being a cone is a negative thing. It's like dude, you are such a cone! But I can't be mad at you cause I woulda did the same thing.
A cone is basically a cheapskate who takes advantage of their situation, and I am a proud cone.
I cone things all the time. Especially at university, like last week,
it was in my dining hall, and a lot of the machinery that they use to cook was down,
so they just had a lot of pre-wrapped sandwiches and muffins and shit like that. And it was early.
So you know, there was a lot of food out, and I just took 2 of everything and put it in my bag and took it home!
Because I pay thousands of dollars to this school to eat there every semester, so I'll take advantage when I can.
so if you are a cone, do not be ashamed. You are welcome in Memphis. The next one is "to jack". This has two meanings.
The first one is to steal. This is the opposite of coning. Coning is taking advantage of something that's free, whereas
to jack something is like you're at the store, you're putting it in your coat and you're leaving.
Like "Hey, look what I just jacked from Kroger." Or if your car gets jacked. That's why they call it a carjacking.
And the second meaning is to fight. I remember growing up in the public school system, there's always somebody fighting for no goddamn reason.
So they'd be like "They jacking over there, they jacking!" If you see a big crowd of people and you hear a lot of hooting and hollering, you can
assume there's somebody jacking inside. And it's not "they jacked with each other", it's not "they jacked each other", it's just "they jacked".
Which, I feel like this definition is kind of questionable when you involve people in it, because there's also a meaning of the word just in general
US American English that is kind of dirty. So.
I do not use the 2nd definition so much, but I'm just gonna throw it out there.
And lastly, the most Memphis word I could think of was "to check". Now.
This was even harder to define than "to cone" because it's not just a word, there's a whole culture and a concept behind it.
To check somebody is to insult somebody about something petty like their outfit or their shoes, or just like
the way they act, I don't know. So the cool thing about checking is that it almost always comes up in a format.
So the format is "____ looking ass, wearing ass, having ass.."
Something like that. So if someone walks in with Skechers, you're like *sucks teeth* "Mane getcho Skecher wearing ass!!"
It's just like you're critiquing somebody on something that is very petty.
And the thing about checking is that it's usually just to get laughs out of somebody. Like if there's people around you that you know are gonna laugh at it too,
your checks are gonna be a little bit better. I could do a whole video essay about checking and how it influences Memphis culture, but basically
it's an act of camaraderie. I catch myself all the time, when I'm critiquing some
celebrity photo, I'll be like "She really thought that dress was cute" and I'll be like you know what? Let me stop checking.
I'll put some videos down in the description because I'm sure I could find some videos about this specifically,
because it's the most Memphis thing. So if you ever hear me say "Stop checking", it's like "Go easy on him" or something like that.
Anyways, before we close, I wanted to leave you guys with the most southern way to say goodbye, or the most southern pleasantry I could think of,
and it occurred to me the other day when I was riding my bike on the sidewalk.
It was a really narrow sidewalk, and there was two guys talking on one side and I was coming through on the other. And they
moved over so I could get through. So I was acknowledging the niceness but also
saying thank you, so I said "Y'all take care now." And to say "Y'all take care" is southern enough, but "Y'all take care NOW"??
That NOW just adds emphasis, like "I'll be checking up on you", or just "really take care of yourself, ok?"
And I think that reflects a lot of the general niceness and southern hospitality that people are always talking about.
Of course we have a lot of problematic shit in the south, we have a lot of close-minded people that make it a shitty experience to live here sometimes,
but stuff like that... when you get a "y'all take care now" or just a "take care" in general, it's like... hmm.
It's a great day to be in the south. So anyways, thanks for watching this video, I hope you learned something not just about the language but also way of life,
culture, all that. I will leave my social media in the description, but if you wanna follow me on twitter,
that's elyssedavega, on Instagram (I CHANGED IT IT'S ELYSSEDAVEGA)!
That's e-l-y-s-s-e-d-a-v-e-g-a.
Y'all take care now, and I'll see you soon. Bye-bye!