Talking Southern – Speaking vs. Writing

    A distinction your commentator feels is necessary to state upon publication of this third Talking Southern article is this: that while formal writing should (at least per your commentator’s education and longtime preference) be just that – formal, with no contractions or other shortcuts – spoken English will virtually always be more relaxed.  In fact, one who possesses mastery of the English language should be a blissful liberty to ignore it in speaking whenever he or she pleases; so long as the hearer knows that the speaker knows better.  Being able to wallow around, as it were, in the language may not have been something the framers of the Bill of Rights had in mind when drafting the First Amendment back in 1791, but in the decidedly not-legal opinion of your commentator (who is about as far from being a lawyer as he is from being a catfish), it is one of those unalienable rights the 1776 Declaration talks about.

      “What in the Sam Hill is Langford talking about?” the reader may reasonably ask.  Well, let us consider a true-life example.  Many years ago when your commentator’s sons were teenagers, one of them was once on the verge of losing his car keys for an infraction he had been warned against.  Had your commentator’s message to him been written, it would have said, “Boy, if you do not stop that right now, I am going to take your car keys and will not give them back till you can behave!”  There is a sentence that is perfectly clear and grammatically sound.  But your commentator said it – admittedly with a bit of heat in his tone – instead of writing it, and if we were to render his speech as phonetically as we are able, it would have sounded something like the following:

      “Boy, if you don’t stop that right now, I’m’o take yo’ cah keys an’ I ain’t gonna give ‘em back till you’gn behave!”  If one just glances over that, it would appear that Snuffy Smith or perhaps Jed Clampett is being quoted.  But if one takes the trouble to sound it out, one will find that the only ungrammatical utterance in it was the usage of the word, “ain’t,” which your commentator used for emphasis, knowing full well that his son knew without a doubt that he knew better than to say.  The rest is just dialect – good, reasonably standard, raised-right, Middle Georgia dialect; nothing more, nothing less.

      A similar example comes from the late Herman E. Talmadge (1913-2002), whose father served as governor in the 1930s and 1940s, who himself served as governor from 1948 to 1955, and served as Georgia’s U.S. Senator from 1957 to 1981.  A brilliant and articulate man from Telfair County, Talmadge had one of the finest Georgia accents in captivity.  Once, an opponent of some sort was bad-mouthing him about something, and Talmadge just shrugged it off without comment – at least until a reporter asked him directly about it.  Talmadge’s reply, which took the better part of thirty seconds for him to enunciate, was, “Waaallllll, I knew that fella’s daddy.  He, too, was a sumbitch.”

    One can see grammatical perfection in that brief senatorial utterance, along with unpretentious, “real folks” dialect that would have been at home in virtually any Georgia parlor.

     So feel free to wallow in the language as both your commentator and the good senator did.  But it would probably be advisable to master its intricacies before you do much wallowing.