Talking Southern No. 85 : Storms of Power and Might

      We in Coweta and Fayette Counties live in an area prone to tornado danger; we all know that.  Most of us have memories of big storms we’ve experienced ourselves, plus perhaps stories of storms that happened long before our time. 

     For instance, around suppertime one day in January 1892, a tornado (then called a cyclone) ripped through Fayetteville just as the town doctor was at the Travis home delivering a baby.  The baby and mother were fine, but the young father opened the front door to check on the noise,  and was swept away in the gale and perished.   Nearby, a chimney fell on a young girl in the Graham family, tragically killing her.  The town doctor’s overcoat was found the next day hanging in a tree in McDonough, twenty-one miles away, with the mail that was in its pocket still intact. 

     Nearly fifty years later, a young couple (your compiler’s paternal grandparents) had just built a house on a wooded hilltop in Brooks, when a microburst or something similar blew through one Sunday afternoon.  Your compiler’s grandmother grabbed her two-year-old son (your compiler’s father) and headed out for the driveway ditch, muttering that her husband was a “damn idiot” for his insistence on staying inside the good, solid house they had just built.  The young mother lay her son face down in the ditch and lay atop him for protection.

     In roared the storm.  Allow your compiler’s grandfather to narrate the rest of it.  “ I was sitting in my favorite chair enjoying my second Camel and listening to the storm roar outside when it occurred to me what the next newspaper might say.   I imagined a headline something like, ‘CHURLISH HUSBAND, DRY AND WARM, LEAVES YOUNG WIFE AND SON TO STORM’S FURY,’ and jumped up to effectuate a rescue.  Just as I got to the door, Kathryn and Dan came rushing back into the house, wet to the bone and covered with tiny leaf and limb debris.   I apparently treated them with sufficient solicitude to avert any further marital crisis.”

     People in most parts of the country pronounce “tornado” pretty much how it looks – “tor – NAY – doe,” which is no doubt what was intended when the word was coined.   But in our Southern way of speaking, it comes out, “tor-NAY-duh,” much to the mirth of folks from elsewhere who think it sounds ignorant. 

     What’s more, the huge tropical storms that bedevil our coasts are called “hurricanes,” which most folks seem to pronounce, “HUR-ri-cane.”  But many of us in the South unconsciously revert to the English pronunciation, which is “HUR-ri-kin,” and which sounds to Yankees like we have mouths-full of mush. 

      You know what?  We don’t really give a rip.  It seems to your compiler that the folks who complain the loudest about our way of doing and saying things are the ones who have moved to our usually balmy clime and dug in.   And as the old saying goes, “Do in Rome as the Romans do.”   Langford’s Corollary is, “‘Tis also wise to speak in Rome as the Romans speak.” 

      Or one can watch a YouTube video of Audrey Hepburn/Eliza Doolittle practicing over and over again before a flaming candle in the 1964 musical film, My Fair Lady, the tongue-twister, “In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.”   

     The stars in that movie say “hurricane” like we Southerners do.  It’s a real shame they didn’t sing about or otherwise mention “tor-NAY-duhs.”