Sumpmteat

Your compiler will make it short and sweet: he wants something to eat.   “How can that be?” you ask.  “Langford’s already broad as the side of a barn; what else could he possibly want?”  That might be true, but what you svelte types cannot possibly realize is how much effort it takes to keep up a waistline like your compiler’s.

    But your compiler’s waistline, ample though it be, is not the subject of today’s discussion.  “Something to eat” is our topic of discussion this week – or as we tend to say it down here, “Sumpmteat” – it’s in the range of being three or four syllables long, but it sounds like a single word and expression in our usage.

     “I want sumpmteat!”  Every Southerner knows what that means.   Jimmy Carter even wrote about it in his marvelous book, An Hour Before Daylight.  Let your compiler be plain for a moment: he loved President Carter as a man and will always be a great admirer of Georgia’s only president.  Several of Mr. Carter’s books are among your compiler’s  favorite reads, and he believes the gentleman was perhaps the best Ex-President who ever has been or ever will be.  But there were moments in the former president’s later years when your compiler dearly wished he would stick to Habitat for Humanity and fighting the guinea worm, and quit making political statements.  It just always seemed to your compiler that the public let him know loudly and clearly what they thought of his politics in November 1980.   But your compiler digresses.

    In An Hour Before Daylight, Mr. Carter wrote that kids in his side-by-side Sumter County towns of Plains and Archery would often ask for “some teat.”  Your compiler will admit it sounds a bit like the former president wrote it, but fears he thinks Mr. Carter’s transcription has echoes of a babe’s suckling in it, and is apparently high-hat enough to like his own approximation of how it sounds better than he likes Mr. Carter’s.   “Sumpmteat” – it has at least three syllables, as mentioned above, and quite possibly four, and is as chewy a phrase as one could hope for in such a usage.

    A little-known fact these days is that the western half of Georgia was once in the Central Time Zone, and that all of Georgia was not changed to Eastern Time until early in 1941, when Governor Eugene Talmadge signed an order proclaiming it so that very day.  It was about 11:30 AM when Governor Talmadge affixed his signature that morning in Atlanta (Central Time), but all of a sudden it was an hour later.   A reporter is said to have asked the governor if he had any comment about his proclamation.   “Nope,” replied the governor curtly.  “It’s thirty minutes past noon, it’s dinnertime, and I’m gonna go get sumpmteat!”

     “Sumpmteat.”  It just makes one feel good to say it!