Aint Claude’s Dirt Clods

Your compiler was driving to work early one recent morning, about halfway listening to NPR, when he heard the announcer refer to someone named “Claude.” The announcer then specified that he didn’t mean a dirt “clod,” but the name “Claude,” as in “Claude Debussy,” the French composer of Clair de Lune fame.  

     Your compiler nearly drove off the road and landed his truck in the ditch at this utterance.  It never occurred to him in the entirety of his sixty-three years that anyone would ever think that “Claude” and “clod” might rhyme.  For you see, he has always pronounced – and heard pronounced – those two words, respectively, as “Clawed”  and “clahd.” And if those terms come even close to rhyming in the Southern scheme of things, his behind is a rotary telephone.

    He has long experience saying both words.  He had a beautiful great-aunt named Jessie Claude Henderson Carmichael (1895-1975), who grew up in Brooks, and who was called “Jessie” by about half the folks she knew, and “Claude” by the other half.  Your compiler’s family referred to her as “Aint Claude,” pronounced “Clawed,” as in, “The tiger clawed the tree.”  

     If they’d called her “Aint Clahd,” she just might have momentarily abandoned her always-ladylike demeanor and hurled a dirt clod at them!   And throwing dirt clods at and with other kids was an important part of growing up in the South.  As many dirt clods as your compiler hurled in his first ten or twelve years, he never once threw – or even saw – a dirt claude.

     This thought process led your compiler down other differences in pronunciation he has heard.  One involves the Oddo family of Fayetteville, a fine group of folks who have contributed in many ways to the good in Fayette County in the fifty-six years they have been here.   Your compiler heard somebody say one time, “Their last name is Oddo – like auto.”

    Sorry, friend, but those don’t rhyme, either, at least down here.  Oddo is pronounced just like it looks – pretty much an “Ah!” for the first vowel, and a long “O” for the last, with a solid “D” in the middle – with most of the weight on the first syllable.  It pretty well rhymes with “motto,” except for the softer “D” sound in the middle.   

     “Auto,” on the other hand, is usually pronounced “AWE-TOE” in these parts, with equal weight on each syllable at times, and at others with the first syllable accented and the second one softened almost to a “D” sound.  Your compiler says it both ways, himself, and is not sure why.   Nobody ever said we had to be consistent in our speech.

     Finally, your compiler’s own name comes into question from time to time.  Once or twice per year, he will get an order from a drive-through ticketed to “Diane,” which is what the order taker wrote down when he said, “Dan.”   And he cannot even transcribe his family’s pronunciation of “Langford”  — it’s something like, “LANG–fid” or “LANG-fd” — but it’s been misunderstood as anything from “Lightfoot” to Lord-knows-what.  Almost every time he says it, the hearer will ask how it’s spelled, and usually utter a surprised, “Oh!” once he or she has printed out the letters.

    And that’s for someone with what he likes to think is at least a somewhat cultured Southern accent.   How much worse is the problem for folks whose accents are country as a sack of hog shorts or a gourd dipper?   There’s just a chasm of misunderstanding, your compiler is afraid, when it comes to Southern language and that of most of the rest of America.  But long live Southernese!