Once, my wife and two friends and I were clearing up after a church coffee hour, Lisa, who grew up in South America, but whose parents were Mississippians, my wife and I are both from Northeast Texas and Lily, whose mother was from southern Louisiana, and whose “Black” speech was rounded over by growing up in San Antonio. With just the four of us there, we slipped into our native tongue, pure upland Southern, with “R’S as strong as they were first heard on the docks as people debarked from Northern Ireland and Scotland.”Can you reach me that, please? “I might could. Lemme see.” Our normal speech is such homogenized American, we rarely think about the fact that it is a later acquired language. But we spent a very relaxed afternoon, speaking the language of our mothers, now departed this life.

Your daughter’s story reminded me of a similar occurance with our oldest son. In the second grade he was asked to identify correct sentences. One of the sentences he marked incorrect was the following: “Suzie sits in the sun.”

Of course the teacher said that was a correct sentence. When we asked him why he thought it incorrect he responded: “Because if she sat in the sun she would burn up.”

We pointed this out to the teacher at our conference and we all had a giggle about it, but of course, our second grader was absolutely correct.

And where I grew up in NJ we said “frog” and “dawg”. One of my favorite little vignettes from my youngest daughters earliest school days was the time she came home furious because she’d gotten a rhyme question wrong on a test. She’d taken “none of the above” since “dawg” most certainly did NOT rhyme with “fog”.

Sunshowers are marvelous. Loved ’em since I was a kid. But I like tundah stahms too.

“Coal Oyl” was also the name of Olive Oyl’s father in the Thimble Theatre “Popeye” cartoons.

One of the memories which stands vivid is about several islands in the Outer Banks where English is still spoken almost exactly as it was in the days of William Shakespeare and the decided difference in the English imported by settlers to New England which was different from the English imported further to the U.S. coastal South. (Teaser: The “hoiddy toiddy” were the well-to-do visitors to the island who could only sail out to it during high tide—dialectly pronounced “hoi toid.”)

Don’t know if it’s available on DVD, but some readers may want to reference the series.

Try to find the different pronunciations of the word “oil” for a few laughs. My mom grew up in southern Indiana and northern Kentucky hearing “oil” pronounced “erl” although her parents taught her to say it correctly. Kerosene was called “coal oal” or, weirdly, “coil erl”.

There is a particular accent heard occasionally in the south, now passing away I think, in which “Mary” is “May-ree”. “May” as in “merry month of”. I guess I have a bit of it, as I grew up pronouncing “Sarah” as “Sayrah” and didn’t know it wasn’t normal until someone remarked on it.