Words

Now seems like a good time to explain the name of the website.

I was born and raised in southern West Virginia. (And, that is not southwestern Virginia. They are totally different places. West Virginia is its own state and is located (can you guess??) west of Virginia.)

About six years ago, I took a huge leap of faith and moved to an area just outside of Madison, Wisconsin. From that moment on, whenever I met someone new, inevitably, they’d say “Do I detect a bit of an accent?”

I am pretty good about it, if I do say so myself. It really doesn’t bother me when they ask. Well, except I want to respond, “BIT of an accent? No, it’s a full blown accent!” Cause, yeah, it is.

For some context, my West Virginian accent is….well, you know the documentaries you can watch where they explore “hollers” and find locals to talk to….and people from other areas of the country almost need closed captioning to understand what is being said. I am not quite that bad. But it is still pretty darn thick.

I spent a lot of time around my great-grandmother growing up, and she was as back woods as it gets. She had 12 siblings and had lived in the mountains of West Virginia her entire life.

(More about her later, she was one of my favorite people in the whole world and I’m sure there will be blogs about her.)

Anyway, she taught me a few words most people have never heard of…like “flibbin’”.

My family’s house was on a hillside (as most houses in WV are), my grandmother’s house was just below us, and my great grandmother’s house was just past my grandmother’s.

My great grandmother………..**sighs in exasperation**

Let’s make all of these relations simpler. Back then, we called my great grandmother Big Granny and my grandmother was Little Granny. Got it? The houses were in a line down the hill, ours at top, Little Granny in the middle, Big Granny on the end.

(By the way, in my mind, their names had nothing to do with their size. The child version of me equated being older with “big” and being younger with “little”.)

So, anyway, living so close to Big Granny, now and then she’d call and ask me to come change a light bulb for her. At that time, she was in her eighties, and not able to do everything herself. One fluorescent light she had in her hallway was particularly troublesome, and she would tell me it was flibbin’, which meant it was flickering. I’d change her bulb and she’d give me $5 for my trouble.

Oh yeah, doing little chores for Big Granny paid pretty well!

(By the way, I recently googled flibbing, and found out a slang version of it is quite….*ahem*….x-rated, but we won’t touch that one with a ten foot pole.)

Another word I picked up from her is “wasper”. It’s a pretty easy one to figure out. She added an “er” to the word “wasp”. So in the spring and summer, she would talk about the waspers buzzin’ around.

I learned the phrase “stew pot” from her, too. It is exactly what it sounds like. Any pot with a handle that was big enough to hold a stew was considered a stew pot. Every so often, she’d call and tell me to come get the stew pot, which meant she had fixed us a pot of stew. To this day, hers is the best stew I have EVER had! I can come close to recreating it, but not quite.

Peonies. Her version of that particular word is something I have nearly lost. Not because I have learned the correct way of saying it, but because I go through several versions trying to say it, in an attempts to have people actually understand what the heck I’m talking about. Her version gets lost in the “pinies”, “pee-oh-knees”, “pee-knees”. Seriously, folks, I don’t know how to say that word anymore, which sucks, ‘cause they are my favorite flower.

People in Wisconsin always gave me a funny look when I talked about going to the movie theatre, too. I say it “thee-ate-er”, while their version comes out waaaaay more sophisticated. Just to lessen the shock value, I pretend I am a posh British person when I say it, now, and it comes out closer to the Midwest version.

Of course, all of my hogs, dogs, frogs, etc. come out as “hawgs”, “dawgs”, “frawgs”, which is easier, ‘cause I think people expect that from folks who come from more southernly places.

The one that really gets ‘em, in a big way, is when I say “yell-ah”, instead of yellow. It was so bad, I would have to stop and try to explain what color I was talking about. You’d have thought I was speaking a foreign language. I guess, to them, I was. Part of the problem was being a daycare teacher, at the time. The poor kids looked at me like I had lost it. Finally, I had to ask my hubby how to say it the way everyone else did.  He told me it is like “jell-0” but with a “y” instead of a “j”. So now, I consciously have to think of jell-o before I talk about the color yellow.

For the most part, I enjoy my accent. People seem to like it, and to be honest, other than “theatre” and “yellow”, I don’t try to hide it. And folks love some of the full on phrases, like “pig in a polk” and “lick their calf over again”.

Since this blog is going to be, in large part, about snippets from my life, I thought I’d go with the phrase I hear when I meet people.

Yes, there’s a bit of an accent. I’m from West Virginia.

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