Peter Oljelund wrote: >Hello Everyone > >Interesting subject! > >I found this text on the internet: > >Mississippians have a dialect of the Old South of very slow speech >often imitated poorly by Hollywood actors (Example is in Gone With the Wind) >that I call "Under the Mag-NOL-yâhs" . People who speak this way often give >the false impression that they are retarded and severly deficit in >intelligence because often it takes them forever and a day to say what they >are going to say since they mull over what they say before they say it. >
Thanks Peter, for this information. I was born and raised in 'swamp-east' Missouri, or the Missouri Bootheel, or extreme southeast Missouri, take your pick. I always wondered where that slow, southern speech I used to have came from. I hated that slow, Old South speech. I dropped it in a hurry when I attended the Missouri School of Mines in Rolla (should have been spelled Raliegh, but it was pronounced Ra'-la so they spelled it that way) and heard others speak. And for the Dutch and German readers on this list, my hometown was a Dutch-German community that also spoke some of the Dutch and German words in a southern drawl. Try to imagine that! Danke is not 2 words? really? :) I try to explain my frustration to people about this Old South drawl with this example. You're walking along the railroad tracks with your friend, when he grabs your arm in alarm and says: "There's a tra............." (insert sound effect) you get knocked skyhigh by the cattle guard on the train as your friend finishes in midair "a comin' !" Seriously, you'd get killed before someone with an Old South drawl could get out the warning. The Other 'Stephen Stubbs' To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
