Talking Southern – Sacks

     Your compiler stopped by a convenience store on a recent road trip and was  offered nothing in which to corral his purchases and carry them to his car.  “May I have a sack?” he asked as politely as he could.

     “A WHAT???” came the clerk’s sarcastic and not-at-all friendly retort.

      “A sack,” he repeated, feeling a bit awkward, defensive, and conspicuous, but unsure as to why.  “A sack…or bag… to carry these things in.”

       The clerk, who so far as your compiler could ascertain was neither foreign nor from the Southeast,  said, “I’ve never heard a bag being called a sack.  I thought a sack was something folks say they hit every night when they go to bed – a sack of feathers, foam, and springs.”

       That got your compiler to wondering whether saying “sack” for “bag” is a Southern thing.  “Sack” is mostly what he heard growing up.   Hog feed, for instance, came in sacks – “a sack of hog shorts” is how they were referred to. (He has heard people describe certain rusticated persons as being, “country as a sack of hog shorts,” which he thinks is a wonderfully colorful metaphor.)  His late mother remembered having dresses made for her as a child from prettily patterned calico flour sacks.  Kentucky 31 fescue seed, which his father bought every spring, came in burlap sacks.  Groceries came in brown paper sacks.  The word “bag” had more to do with suitcases than with less permanent conveyances of goods.  “Sack,” in other words, pretty well covered the world of flexible, portable, and usually temporary conveyance containers.

     There is even a town in Georgia – Resaca – which legend (probably hateful to those who live there, and almost certainly apocryphal) says was named for a situation involving very large sack.   Your compiler has heard since childhood that in that area of north Georgia two centuries  ago, lived an Indian chief who had two daughters – one, the fairest maiden in the land, and the other of significantly less fortunate physiognomy if we want to be polite about it, or ugly enough to scare a wild dog off a gut bucket if vividness of speech is our principal goal.

     A young white settler in the area became entranced with the lovely daughter and made entreaties with her father for her hand in marriage.  The father was unbending in his refusal, so the young man devised a far less noble plan – to send some of his rougher friends into the Indian camp late at night with a large, body-sized, cloth receptacle to kidnap the lovely daughter and spirit her away.

    The night came; the kidnapping party was dispatched; the young man awaited anxiously.  By and by, the abductors swarmed back into the man’s yard with a large, squirming cloth bag in tow.  The young man tore open the bag and saw that his friends, in their haste, had kidnapped the wrong daughter.  “Re-sack huh!” he demanded, his hopes for a beautiful bride dashed.  (Some legends, the astute reader will likely surmise, are more believable than others.  But at least the story might keep you from wanting to pronounce that town, “re-SOCK-uh,” which is not right.)

     The late writer and humorist, Lewis Grizzard (1946-1994), enjoyed enormous economic success in his short life, but apparently only understood one financial metric – what he called, “the brown paper sack test,” according to at least one biographer.   His financial advisor would try to explain all Lewis’s complicated and revenue-generating holdings, and Grizzard would shake his head and say, “All I want to know is, if I quit writing and speaking, and throw everything I have in a big paper sack, how long can I live on the beach without bringing in any more money?”

    It’s a reasonable question.  And you can put that in your sack and tote it home!