Talking Southern – Blind Hogs and Acorns

     Blind hogs and acorns, respectively, are the subject and object of a colorful old Southern expression that evolved in a day when most Southerners were engaged in agriculture and livestock endeavors.  The saying expresses something that is pure, unbounded luck –“like a blind hog stumbling over an acorn.”

     Your compiler’s late father, an accomplished and successful businessman in Atlanta, would use the phrase to diminish encomia heaped upon him from time to time for astute business decisions.  “It wasn’t particularly prescient on my part,” he was liable to say.  “It was more like an old blind hog stumbling upon an acorn.”  Your compiler heard him say it a thousand times, for no matter how sophisticated the circles in which he might find himself, the man never once outgrew his raising or forgot his good, old-fashioned, rock-solid rural roots in Brooks, Georgia.

    “Like a blind hog stumbling upon an acorn” – it just sounds Southern, does it not?   Iowa may be the nation’s largest hog producer, but your compiler cannot conceive in his wildest imaginings of a native Iowan using that expression in any situation.  Nor a  New Englander, nor a Californian, for that matter.  So he believes it must be Southern, for colorful and vivid expression is our stock-in-trade.

     Your compiler has never been around hogs except superficially, so he knows little of their nature.  His family had long quit porcine pursuits by the time he arrived on the scene in 1962, but a good friend of his who had grandparents in the South Georgia town of Hazlehurst afforded him his only real memory of hogs.  He and his friend, playing in the yard one summer day in 1967, somehow managed to open the hog pen gate, releasing a veritable torrent of shoats and several grown and eager hogs.  These were not old blind hogs rooting for acorns – they were young, seeing hogs scampering to unexpected freedom – hogs who had little regard for the young boys who had inadvertently let them out, and the rushing swine very well could have trampled them to death had a lot of luck – kind of like that of a bling hog stumbling over an acorn – not been with them, not to mention a good dollop of providence.

     Going back a century before that summer day in Jeff Davis County, your compiler surmises that any old blind hogs which might have escaped commandeering by General Sherman’s marauding troops in 1864 Georgia might have had a hard time for some years after then, for your compiler has heard that many Southerners of the era were reduced to grinding and boiling acorns to make coffee for a good while after the war.  A commentator of the time remarked rather piquantly that a crow flying over Georgia after Sherman’s March would have had to carry its own rations, so it seems the poor old blind hogs of the day would have been unusually lean during those years for want of acorns. But your compiler, alas, digresses significantly.  He cannot help it, for he is Southern.

     Your compiler can easily and aptly apply the phrase to his pleasure in having been chosen to write the Talking Southern column for The Citizen, for the day Editor-in-Chief  Ellie White-Stevens contacted him about writing a weekly local color column, he felt like an old blind hog who had stumbled upon a truly fine acorn, and the feeling has not diminished in the months that have elapsed since then.  He greatly appreciates those who read and respond to the assorted hogwash the old blind boar (not, he hopes, “bore”) comes up with every week.  Hopefully there is an acorn or two of truth – or reminiscence – or levity, at least occasionally, in these cobbled-together effusions of his.