What Did You Say?

Every area and, indeed, every family has sayings which sound odd to outsiders. Some of these are common and some are not so common. My ex-husband's family was from Mississippi and they called a water hose a hosepipe and the trunk of a car the turtle hull.

In my family, after the clothes were folded and ready to be put away, we would say, "We have to save the clothes." Or, when the dishes were washed and dried we had to "save" the dishes. My friend, Judy, thought this was the funniest thing she ever heard.

"What do you mean 'save' the clothes? Are they on fire? Are they drowning?" she would ask.

"We have to save the clothes. You know. Put them in the drawers, hang them in the closets. Why, what do you call it?"

She could never tell me what she called it because she was always laughing so hard.

A more common phrase we use when people drive up and are talking to you from their car is, "Y'all get down," meaning, "Please exit your vehicle and enter my residence for further conversation and possibly food and beverage." This doesn't involve the disco type of 'get down,' as a rule, though sometimes that can happen also, especially if it's a holiday. The best we can determine, is that this phrase originated when people traveled to each other's homes by horse and buggy and they had to 'get down' to exit the buggy.

My grandfather was especially fond of the word "yonder" meaning "over there" and the thought of using the phrases "you guys" or "you all" instead of "y'all" is a difficult concept for most of us to grasp.

I had a boss from Ohio years ago who would mock the whole staff when we would say "fixin' to" as in "I'm fixin' to put the last patient in the examination room." I wanted so badly to tell him, "Look, jerk. You're in Texas. We'll let you live here and we'll tolerate your weird accent, but don't tell us how to talk. If I'm ever in Ohio, and I'm fixin' to complain about the lousy weather or the lousy food or the unfriendly people then you can tell me something."