Talking Southern No. 98 – Full as a Tick

    All of us have been in situations where we ate food prepared for us by another.  An expression that worldwide experience has been preserved in your compiler’s family since it arose back in the late 1920s or early 1930s. 

     Your compiler’s great-grandparents in Brooks ran a large farm (which your compiler and his family live on today) with many tenant houses dotting its fields and copses.  The tenants in these cabins did much of the actual work on the farm, and the custom of the day was that the owner would provide each workday’s big meal, which was in the noon hour and was always called “dinner.”   Your compiler’s great-grandmother, Mattie Henderson Crawford (1882-1972) prepared this Lucullan banquet each day on her wood-burning stove, with household help contributing greatly to the effort.

   One day, a new tenant on the place, who was possessed of wonderful manners but less than precise grammar, brought his dirty plate back to the kitchen door to turn it in, and said, “Miss Mattie, I appreciates my enjoyment.”  Ever since, that utterance has been a catchphrase in your compiler’s family when a lavish compliment needs to be paid to the preparer of a wonderful meal.  “I appreciates my enjoyment,” gets the job done neatly and with remembrance of bygone days.

     That got your compiler to thinking about the times he has filled himself so full of food that he was uncomfortable.  “My eyes were bigger than my stomach,” he might say in such an instance, as would many other Southerners.   Or “I’m so full yall are gonna have to roll me away from the table.”  Or, “I’m stuffed to the gills,” which apparently means full up to about the neck region.

     But perhaps the most common saying in such a situation is, “I’m full as a tick.”   This can have two meanings, but your compiler believes the first is the most obvious and the probable source.  Everyone in the South knows about the tiny insects that crawl up legs and attach themselves in oft-hard-to-reach spots.   There they can grow and grow if we do not detect them – although how someone cannot detect such an intense itching sensation is beyond your compiler’s understanding – they can become HUGE, many times larger than their original size, completely bloated with the blood they’ve sucked out of the human, or dog, or cat, or whatever mammal they were feasting on.

     Anyone who has seen a grape-sized tick can understand the saying, “Full as a tick.”  It’s somewhat gross when one thinks too hard about it, but it’s quite vivid.  And a tick bite, the uncomfortable effects of which last nearly a month if one is lucky, and a lifetime if one is not, might be described as “the gift that keeps on giving.”

    The second possibility for the term, “full as a tick,” is old feather- or straw-stuffed beds our ancestors used before Beautyrest, Sealy, and Serta came onto the scene.  The cover into which the feathers or straw was stuffed was called a tick, perhaps because it was often made with a striped cotton fabric which is still known as “ticking” or “pillow ticking.”  Such old-fashioned beds would naturally have been rather lumpy, so folks stuffed the ticks as full as they possibly could to minimize thin spots once the mattress was placed into service.  That is the second possible derivation of the term, although probably a less likely one than the example from the insect world.

      When your compiler is full as a tick, he is always careful to thank the cook or cooks of the food in which he has just over-partaken.   Then – almost always, if it’s late enough in the evening – he treats the entire assembled company to his celebrated and cacophonous Nocturnal Nasal Symphony to demonstrate his sincere appreciation for his enjoyment.