Once, Dan and I were going through a breakfast buffet in Calgary, Canada. The lines were long, and as I was chasing a slippery boiled egg with the provided spoon, I turned to the somewhat impatient lady next to me, and trying to ease the tension remarked, “What a sneaky little critter!” Instead of laughing, the aghast woman blurted out, “You’re from the South!”

Channeling my inner Scarlett O’Hara, I answered, “Why yes I am! I do so love a Southern accent. I think Jimmy Carter’s accent was the best. Don’t you?”

Southern women. Early in life we learn the fine art of genteel inflections. “Well, at least she’s trying, bless her heart,” followed by a smile versus “Well, at least she’s trying, bless her heart,” followed by a meaningful pause.

Southern women do not raise their voices when a raised eyebrow will do. I once wore an above-the-knee dress to church. I’d paired the dress with a pair of knee boots. It was a tad short, but I thought it was fine, until after the service while greeting our female associate pastor. The pastor raised her eyebrow. Never an ill word was spoken, but I never wore that dress to church again.

On a ramble around Colorado, husband Dan and I stopped at a small museum and struck up a conversation with the museum’s curator. The man was a fellow Southerner whose wife was a native Coloradan. The conversation turned to the abrupt conversations we’d had with some of the locals, an abruptness that to us seemed bordering on rudeness. The man said Coloradans have places to be and people to see; a get-on-with-it attitude if you will. Southerners’ slow conversations, often laced with storytelling, made his wife impatient, and the habit of phrases that addressed the topic sideways, seemed dishonest to her.

To quote a line from the movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Our country has so many regional differences.

  • For the first few weeks when our older son attended college in Boston, he said he felt like everyone was shouting at him.
  • We were once in Wisconsin for a week on business and occasionally had to spell our words to be understood.
  • When Dan was in the Navy and we were living in Charleston, South Carolina, we once toured Barbara Hutton’s home. We only understood the random word or two of our tour guide, a problem that after several months of living in the low country finally resolved itself.

I recently read a forum concerning communication issues with one man posting that when his wife moved to East Tennessee from Maryland and heard the phrase “I don’t care to,” she was flummoxed to learn that means “I’d be happy to do that.”

The man’s post was very negative and, in order to enlighten him, I posted that East Tennessee’s mountains daunted many early travelers. This geographical problem meant language isolation, the result of which was that many phrases from a much older form of English prevailed. The word care can denote having a problem, and as seen in that light, saying “I don’t care to” can mean, ‘that will not give me a care,’ something Southerners who grew up hearing the phrase understood.

I sometimes think it’s a miracle we all rub along at all.

Communication, in whatever form it takes, is important. Most of us are trying to live our best lives, but if we react negatively to a regional phrase, or feel slighted by wordology with which we aren’t familiar, our path forward can be delayed and our best selves are no longer on display.

So, friends and neighbors, if you don’t care to, please keep in mind patience with others’ words. After all, they’re trying their best, bless their hearts.

Cindy Arp, teacher/librarian, retired from Knox County Schools. She and husband Dan live in Heiskell.