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Being born rural helped
me bond with y'all
By Jeff Kaley, The Duncan Banner
Welcome back to another edition of What the Heck You Talkin’ About, the column dedicated to examining how Americans communicate despite the fact so few of us speak English fluently.
As always, this column is underwritten by the Society of Burned Out Diction Teachers, whose motto is: We’re wasting our time trying to educate people to speak properly.
First, the usual disclaimer. Read my lips: I grew up in the state of Illinois, which is pronounced “ill-a-noy,” not Ill-a-noise! Illinois is a word of French origin, and because of that, “nois” is pronounced “noy.” Anyone who pronounces it noise is kin to that cracker with the golf ball-sized goiter on his neck, who blew away Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in the final scene of “Easy Rider.”
Whew! Always good to get that off my chest.
And truth be told, the mispronunciation of my naive state is not limited to folks living south of the Mason-Dixon Line or in Bugtussle, Oklahoma. In my travels, I’ve heard Illinois verbally butchered by otherwise bright people in every corner of this great nation.
And just to show I’m a fair and balanced member of the Diction Police, we from the Land of Lincoln also have vernacular peccadilloes that drive well-spoken people crazy.
There’s that annoying nasal accent that’s peculiar to residents of the Windy City, the Second City, the Hog Butcher of the Nation. Up in Chicago, they even pronounce the name of their city incorrectly. Stop somebody on State Street and they’ll tell you they live in She-Kag-Oh and they’re on the way to pick up a newys-pa-pah.
I’m from downstate Illinois, which is defined as any area outside a 30-mile radius of Chicago. (That’s “sha-cog-oh.”)
Illini from downstate have a couple of location pronunciations that are peculiar only to us. We pronounce Cairo as Kay-roh and Vienna, named for the Austrian city, is called Wye-anna.
Actually, the propensity of downstate Illinois to mispronounce town names is one reason I felt quite at home moving to a state in which Miami is called My-am-ah, instead of “My-am-me,” the preferred pronunciation in Florida and Ohio.
Another shared diction trait that helped me make a smooth transition from rural Illinois to Oklahoma is that downstate Illini have never seen a “g” we couldn’t drop from the end of a word. In Illinois countryside, going is goin’, coming is comin’, dancing is dancin’ and taking is takin’.
(My lovely wife suggests that I’ve just given you too many examples of “g” droppin’. To which I reply with another downstate Illinois expression, “Thppppft.” Then I remind her that she’s from Kansas, where Arkansas is pronounced Are-kansas!)
But back to the shared regional expressions I was so pleased to find when arriving in Oklahoma nearly 20 years ago.
When I got here, I already knew what “shuckins” and” tarnation” meant. I was aware “vittles” had nothing to do with a musical instrument, and that “goin’s-on” referred to activities.
Old-fangled? New-fangled? Sure, I understood.
I felt right at home the first time I heard an Okie intone, “Ahh, pshaw.”
“Fixin’ to go?” You bet I am.
When a newly divorced friend from Marlow proclaimed he’d just gotten “shed of his wife,” I could commiserate. When an Okie said they were “shellin’ a mess a goobers,” I could respond that I used to spend time “shellin a mess a peas.”
I knew how to “take a notion” and then “commence” to actually doing it.
I must admit being a bit taken aback the first time I heard two Okies have this conversation:
“Can I have a Coke?”
“What kind?”
“A Dr. Pepper”
But that odd Okie-ism aside, I’ve felt fortunate to discover that the walls of diction and vernacular between the land in which I grew up and the land in which I’m growing old are not all that high.
Plus, there is one great gift of language Oklahomans have given me, a word that now slides from my lips as though I’ve been saying it since birth.
“Y’all” is one of the most functional words ever created; a magnificent word that can be both singular and plural.
Tarnation! I’ve got a notion I’ll never be shed of usin’ that word for the rest of my life. Thanks, y’all.
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