The following is a list of southern words which also occur in the Appalachian dialect:
- Cornpone—skillet cornbread made without eggs;
- Directly—later, after a while, soon;
- Fit—sometimes used in place of fought;
- Blinked—sour, rotten;
- Fixin’—they’re fixin’ to get hitched on Saturday;
- Gaum—mess, used as a noun and transitive verb; e.g., ‘to gaum up’ (to mess up);
- Holler—hollow, as in a valley between two hills;
- Hull—to shell, as in to shell beans;
- Kyarn—carrion; dead fish, such as roadkill; e.g., ‘That smells like kyarn’;
- Lamp oil/coal oil—kerosene;
- Lay out—to be truant; e.g., ‘to lay out of school,’ ‘to lay out of work,’ sometimes ‘lay off’ as in lay off from work;
- Meeting—a gathering of people for religious purposes;
- Nary/nary’ne—none;
- Palings—fence posts;
- Peckerwood—a disliked person;
- Piece—distance; e.g., ‘He’d have went up the road a piece to get to the main road;
- Plum/plumb—completely; e.g., ‘Son, you’re plum crazy’;
- Poke—a brown paper bag;
- Poke sallet/salat/salit (etc.) a type of salad made from boiled greens (usually pokeweed) ;
- Pokestock/polkstalk—a single-shot shotgun, historically with an unusually long barrel;
- Quare—queer, strange, odd; completely unrelated to sexuality; e.g., ‘He’s shore a quare ‘un;
- Reckon—to suppose, e.g., ‘I reckon you don’t like soup beans;
- Right smart—good deal of; e.g., ‘a right smart piece (a long way);
- Sigogglin—not built correctly, crooked, out of balance;
- Skift—a dusting of snow;
- Slap—full, complete; e.g., ‘A fall in the river, which went slap-right and straight down;
- Sop—gravy;
Quips and jokes only
A reader tells me that she actually observed the following signs:
On a maternity clothes shop: “We’re open on labor day.”
On a front door: “Everyone on the premises is a vegetarian except the dog.”
At an optometrist’s office: “If you don’t see what you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place.”
On a taxidermist’s window: “We really know our stuff.”
In a podiatrist’s window: “Time wounds all heels.”
On a butcher’s window: “Let us ‘meat’ your needs.”
On another butcher’s window: “Pleased to ‘meat’ you.”
At a used car lot: “Second hand cars in first crash condition.”
In a veterinarian’s waiting room: “Be back in 5 minutes. Sit! Stay!”
On a music teacher’s door: “Out Chopin.”
In a restaurant window: “Don’t stand there and be hungry, come in and get fed up.”
Inside a bowling alley: “Please be quiet. We need to hear a pin drop.”
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Top o’ the morning!