“How’s
your mama and them?”
That’s the kind of sentence that makes an English
teacher start looking around for her red pen, but it’s a good example of old Texas
speak.
Old Texas speak (let’s just brand it OTS) is not Hollywood Texas
talk laced with inept uses of “y’all” (as in using the term singularly rather
than collectively), overuse of “pardner” or “pard” and exaggerated drawl. Neither
is OTS enhancing sentences with colorful similes, as in “hotter than a $2 pistol
on Saturday night.”
OTS is simply the way of talking that long-time Texans
remember from when our native state was a lot more native than it is today. In
other words, back when Texas was the nation’s largest state in square miles but
relatively shy of people per square mile.
Much
of OTS centers on the use of particular words, not full sentences. For instance,
particularly in East Texas, you might
hear someone say, “I carried her to church [the grocery store, or wherever.]”
Literally, that sounds like the speaker picked the person up in his arms and toted
her to where she needed to go. However, the real meaning of “carried” in this
usage is “gave her a ride” or “took her.”
The classic example of OTS is
the use of “fixin’” as a shorter, more effective way of articulating “getting
ready to….” In OTS, for example, one might say, “I’m fixin’ to carry Mama to the
doctor.” And the contraction for “you all” (sure, most of us know that the correct
collective pronoun is simply “you”) is still “y’all,” even though its usage seems
to be waning in our mostly urban state.
Another word old Texans used in
an interesting way is “directly.” To most, that word means to go straight from
Point A to Point B. But somehow, in Texas, the word
came to stand for “after a while” or “in a bit.”
“I’ll go to the post
office directly,” does not at all imply traveling by the shortest route. It means,
“I’ll be going to the post office in a little while.” Another usage would be,
“Directly, the deer walked out of the brush.”
“Country” is another word
that has a whole other meaning in Texas, especially
in West Texas.
As a young
reporter in San
Angelo in the 1960s, I soon became accustomed to hearing long-time West Texans
refer to a particular region or area as “country.”
“I’ll be down in the
Ozona country today,” a cattleman might say to someone at the livestock auction
in announcing his planned 80-mile, one-way drive from Tom Green County to Crockett
County.
“Yonder” is yet another good old Texas word. Its dictionary definition
aside, in Texas – particularly West
Texas – it morphed from a word that describes the far distance to one meaning
a closer “over there” or even closer “here.”
“Yonder comes ole Jim Bob,”
a West Texan might observe. “Wonder if he’s been down in the Ozona country?”
Speaking
of “down,” even prepositions like “up” and “down” are subject to variant usage
in Texas. People in Austin,
for example, are wont to say they are planing to go “up to Dallas”
or “down to San Antonio.”
While
north unquestionably lies up on a map, and south is down, no matter how flat Texas
may look in places, it actually follows the curve of the earth. East and west,
on the other hand, are covered with “over,” as in someone in Waco saying, “I’ll
be going over to Longview.”
“Out” comes into play laterally. If the east or westward journey is a
particularly long one, say from Austin
to El Paso, common Texas
usage would be, “I’m going out to El
Paso next week.”
Regardless
of where a Texan lives, chances are that part of the state needs rain.
I’ve
seen older Texans look at the sky and pronounce: “It’s coming a rain.” Obviously,
the more traditional way to say that would be, “Looks like it’s gonna rain.” In
the Panhandle, I once heard an
oldtimer describe an approaching storm cloud as a “weather breeder.” (“Yonder
comes a weather breeder…it’ll be raining directly.”)
Having breakfast
at a café in Mason
one early spring, I heard one well-weathered cattleman say to the other, “Are
you green yet?” That question had nothing to do with whether his coffee-drinking
neighbor supported responsible environmental endeavors like recycling. What he
meant was, “Have you got grass growing on your place?”
Maybe there’s still
hope for talking like a Texan, even with email, texting and tweeting continuing
to abbreviate our language. An example of more contemporary Texas
talk is to say it’s time to “cowboy up” instead of declaring that you or someone
else needs to act like a grownup and do what you have to do. For instance, if
you misplace your smart phone or digital reader, you’ve just got to cowboy up
and buy another one or else you’re fixin’ to miss out on a lot of texts and tweets.
© Mike Cox
- June 12, 2013 column
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