Talking Southern – Not!

Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, your compiler sat through several tedious online sessions of continuing education.   Being  certified public accountant, he must accumulate forty hours per year of approved content, which is an onerous task, indeed.  

One can imagine how dull such sessions typically are; CPAs as a whole are so colorless we don’t even attract jokes like lawyers and preachers do.   Only actuaries have less pizazz – your compiler has heard it said that actuaries are folks without enough personality to be CPAs.   Your compiler has digressed a bit, but his point is that one can envision how painfully drab his profession’s canned continuing ed efforts can be – about as stimulating as watching paint dry. 

One continuing ed session your compiler saw in that late-year rush to satisfy licensing requirements made him mad, though.  It featured a fellow with one of the least appealing, most strident Yankee accents he has ever been confronted with, making him wonder, “Where in the world does anyone get off talking like that??”  The English language is supposed to be beautiful and nearly musical, but folks cursed with accents like that clown’s absolutely ruin it, to your compiler, anyway.  They must have scoured the back alleys and most blighted pockets of Newark to find someone with an accent and delivery as “in-your-face” obnoxious as his was.

But what your compiler really objected to was the commentator’s continual use of the dubious word, “Lookit,” as in, “You say to the IRS auditor, ‘Lookit!  I’ve paid my taxes every year and filed on time, and now you’re auditing me for the third time in three consecutive years.  Lookit, I want this harassment to stop!’”

Lookit?? What in the Sam Hill kind of word is that?  Any Southerner who would say such a thing would be (or at least should be) tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail.   Lookit??   How ridiculous can one get?   If there’s anything a self-respecting Southerner should never say, then “Lookit” would have to be at or at least near the top of the list.Lookit??  For the first time in your compiler’s sixty-three years on this earth, he is tempted to say, “Enough already!”    But since we established in the Talking Southern column of March 27, 2025, that such usage of the adverb “already” as an intensive is virtually as unacceptable for a Southerner as saying “Lookit,”   he’ll just sign off with a fervent, “Lord, help us all!”