What is a "dingbatter"?
Really not a bad person, just an outsider that comes in and asks you where the lighthouse
is when he's standing right in front of it or pointing out over to Pamlico Sound says,
"Is this the Atlantic Ocean?"
"What time do the 4 o'clock ferry leave?"
That's a Core Sound word, that's what James Barry says.
There are dingbatters and then there are dingbatters.
There's real ones
- and then there ones that you just, you know. - And then there are blank-blank dingbatters.
This is a dingbatter.
He married a Downeast woman.
A Downeast woman.
He married a Downeast woman, he's from Kenosha- Wisconson.
Wisconson.
Now this is what we consider a dingbatter.
A damned dingbatter.
I've been here before he was born.
It doesn't matter.
Ever since I can remember, somebody not from here was called a dingbatter.
Or a dit dot or a woodser.
People not from here was called woodsers, too.
And I asked daddy one time, I remember when I was young, I said, "Daddy, why does Charlie
call that crowd woodsers?"
That was his daddy.
He said, "Well that's somebody from inland," not from the banks and around the water.
That's what old folks used to call them, woodsers.
You get out here and they work you too hard, any kind of thing like that.
Be mommucked to death.
All my whole life, I use it all the time.
That's just about as bad as it could get, to be mommucked.
It's just about as bad as it could get.
It means to shred or tear apart, it's just no other word for it except mommucked.
You've been mommucked, you know.
I mean, you've been shrimping all night, you're tired, you're wet, you're hungry,
you've just been shredded to pieces all night.
You have been mommucked.
Let's sit on the pizer.
A porch.
Let's sit on the pizer.
Yeah well say the pizer, that's a porch that goes around the house.
You sit out on the pizer.
Yeah, the real name is porch, we call it pizer.
Well them older people I think, some of them are worse than others, but they call it pizer.
Gonna sit on the pizer.
Piaza is the right name.
But we just always called them pizers.
They say how hot the weather is, cam and that's moderate and then they say
that's slickcam, it means the water looks like, water like oil on it, see.
Slickcam?
That's when there's no wind whatsoever, like you go out there and look on that water and
it's perfectly slick.
There's no movement.
But slickcam means there's nothing moving.
That's slickcam.
Cam.
It means calm.
Slick on the water.
Anything maybe that you're building and it's supposed to be level and it's supposed to
true and it's supposed to be square and something didn't work out right, it's whopperjawed.
Whopperjawed, yeah that's like you're building a boat and she's just like she's whopperjawed.
Something not true, you know if it's out of shape, it'd be whopperjawed.
Drime was a cussword like when we were growing up.
Ain't nobody else that used it, but just the people here.
And I don't think to this day anybody's ever known what it meant.
I think I know, but I'll tell you this, I had an 8th grade English teacher that if she
caught you saying it she'd make you write it a thousand times but yet you didn't know
how to spell it.
Drime is like, like... well I know what drime is when I say it.
Well let me see if I can explain it to you.
Drime would be like, it's not real, or you're not telling the truth, or they stretch it
and you'll go, "Drime!"
Somebody would be sitting and start talking, telling a tail or something and they didn't
believe it or something, "Drime!
That ain't right!
There ain't no way that that's right."
Drime.
It's like you're calling somebody's bluff, "Drime, I know you're not."
Yeah, I've heard that so many times, drime.
I don't even think that's in English language.
Drime.