Talking Southern – Common, Tacky, and Sorry

 Southern ladies (mostly, but sometimes gentlemen, too) used the first two title words almost interchangeably, and may still, in bringing up their children.  “That’s tacky,” your complier can hear his late mother saying across the years.  “Don’t be common.”

    “Tacky” is easy enough to understand.  Think of Dolly Parton (appearance only; her charitable works and value-driven way of living are commendable), downtown Helen, Georgia, downtown Gatlinburg, Tenn., or Cherokee, N.C., and the reader should have no problem understanding full-flowered tat and tackiness.

     But “common” can be confusing  In warning her children against being common, your compiler’s late mother did not mean “ordinary,” although ordinary was never the level she and her husband urged their children to seek.  By “common,” she meant “plebian,” “unwashed,” “unmannered,” and most certainly not “raised right.”

     Something exceptionally common caused her to use blistering phraseology – “common as pig tracks.”  When Jane Langford said that, one could hear the disdain in her voice, and could bet she thought the folks in question were of dubious quality, people she wanted nothing to do with, even at times distant family.  “Those folks are as common as pig tracks,” she would say about the harum-scarum clan one of her mother’s numerous Fayette County first cousins had married into. “They’re not my kinfolks; I gave ‘em away!”

     Moving on down the tolerance scale, from more tolerant to less, we encounter the descriptor “sorry.”  Your compiler is not talking about sorry as it is used when making apologies or experiencing remorse. All of us probably need more of  that kind of sorry, and such is not the usage of which your compiler writes.

     “He’s just sorry as gulley dirt,” your compiler can hear his folks saying about a particularly loathsome and disreputable character in their hometown, whose actions and appearance went way past common and tacky.    Common and tacky are conditions which can be ameliorated under the right circumstances, for both conditions generally stem from folks who try reasonably hard but just do not know any better.  Your compiler is not so sure about “sorry;”  that term strongly implies an unsurmountable deficiency of character and integrity.

     Your compiler’s parents warned him and his siblings against being sorry; even the best families had (and have) an occasional sorry sort to crop up.  “Son, only sorry folks do that” (or don’t do that, as the case might have been), your compiler can hear both his late parent say.  “That’s just plain sorry!”   It is a lesson learned early and learned well in Southern circles, and your compiler will bet there are not many Southerners on the face of the earth who do not know what it means.   In fact, about the only thing your compiler can think of that is worse than being called “sorry” is to be found deserving of the opprobrious brand.

      So if there’s moral here, it might boil down to this:  if you think you might be common or tacky, you might want to work on overcoming that.  Otherwise, you might be sorry.