Talking Southern – Scaring Dogs

    Your complier and a local friend were visiting one afternoon many years ago, and their conversation eventually rambled through one of those unexplained but often entertaining digressions to which Southern conversations are evermore subject, to the point that it originally touched upon a long-deceased woman of most unfortunate physiognomy and disposition who had once lived in their community.  

    While remarking unsympathetically on the congenital misfortunes of folks is terribly unkind, it unfortunately can be rather entertaining, which is why so many of us tend to trespass in this manner.  It’s kind of like the old saying which begins sympathetically, but then goes a bit off-track, says: “He can’t help being ugly, but he could have stayed at home.”  It’s just a kind of natural veer away from kindness which all but the very best of us tend to take on occasion.

     When the angry, unattractive old woman in question came up in the aforementioned conversation, your compiler is ashamed to admit that he trotted out tired old expressions like “mean as a snake” and “ugly as a mud fence.” But he thought he redeemed himself rather adroitly by observing the probability that when the woman’s mama had gone into labor, old Doc Gable, who had delivered the unfortunate child along with nearly everyone else in Brooks Station, had gone into shock.

      The local friend, who has far more imagination and color in his general thoughts and utterances than your compiler can ever hope to muster, totally ignored what the latter had thought to be a rather clever repartee (your compiler is excellent at remembering things like that which he has read somewhere or another), and muttered, “Mud fence, my a–!  That old woman was so ugly she would’ve scared a wild dog off a gut bucket!  And she was mean enough to keep ‘em at bay if they started coming back toward it.”

    Your compiler still laughs when the phrase – “,,,would scare a wild dog off a gut bucket” –  crosses his mind, for it’s one of the most vivid expressions he has ever heard.  Wild dogs, of course, are known for their ravenous hunger, and a bucket of fish innards or slaughterhouse offal would constitute a Lucullan banquet for the benighted beasts.   

     The local friend said it was a phrase his late father had used, but at the time all those years ago it was new to your compiler.   Still, it sounds indubitably Southern – one finds it hard to imagine that it would be heard very often in Greenwich or Newport – so your compiler includes it in the hope that readers will enjoy it as much as he has – and perhaps even be able to employ it on occasion.