Old -- and kind of weird -- expressions

Arkansas speech can be fascinating and colorful. Our old Ozark speech is still heard around northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri, but it is not nearly so pronounced as it once was. Many people have moved into the area, bringing western and northern and mid-western ways of saying things, and on television the speech that we hear is commonly not Ozark, but New York or Boston or Hollywood or mid-west speech. We've become very cosmopolitan, and all the influences have had an effect on the way we talk.

I lived my first 20 years or so of life in the Pea Ridge area. Then, when I became a church pastor, we moved to places like Morrilton and Oppelo and Conway and Kansas City, Mo., and Tingley, Iowa; then back to Arkansas to Wheatley and Alma and Atkins and Searcy and Berryville and Jonesboro and Piggott and Augusta. I started noticing around Oppelo and Morrilton that people used certain words differently from what I heard in northwest Arkansas.

One word which was used in an unusual way was the word "carry." I noticed people saying things like "I carried so-and-so to Morrilton yesterday." To me, to "carry" someone was to pick them up in your arms or to throw them over your shoulder and walk under their weight to get somewhere. One day, before I began grasping how the people in that community used the word, one of them was telling me that they "carried" Mrs. Doe into town this morning. My response was, "Oh, was she sick?" The person looked at me in a puzzled way, and said, "Oh no, we just went in for groceries!" I soon realized that when they said they carried someone somewhere, they just meant that they gave them a ride.

Then, in the east Arkansas delta country, I noticed that some people used a variation of the word "only" in a way that I had never heard. For example, some of my friends there would speak of an item of which there was only one as "the onliest one." Like, "This ain't much of a tractor, but it's the onliest one I got!" Or, "This here is my onliest daughter!"

The old Ozark language didn't have special words so much, but it had unusual ways of pronouncing words and a tendency to shorten words and to combine them into unusual expressions. Even though for the most part I don't speak Ozark anymore, certain expressions are still there for me. For example, today I asked someone to "c'mere." In response, they asked me What do you mean by "c'mere"? Well, it means "come here," isn't that obvious? No? We used to have the common Ozark expression, "S'go!" That was just a shorter and glued together version of "Let's go!" or "Let us be on our way." It was also a great expression for cheering on your basketball team -- "S'go, S'go, S'GO!!"

I like our old expressions for describing the rains. We would say, "It's a-mistin'." That usually meant that a cloud was on the ground and we were feeling the mist. In Ozark, you hardly ever pronounce the "g" at the end of a word. You may spell it out "m-i-s-t-i-n-g" if you want, but you pronounce it "mistin'." The TV weather man "or lady" may say "it's raining." In Ozark, it's "rainin', or better, it's "a-rainin'." If it's really a-rainin' hard, you're a-havin' a gully-washer, or it may be a toad-strangler, or a cloudburst. If the wind is a-blowin' and it's a-rainin' hard, then you would say "It's comin' down in sheets!" Or, it's a-rainin' by the bucketload! Some people would say, it's a-rainin' cats and dogs. I never did get that one. It always looked like water a-fallin' outa the sky to me.

Ozark did keep that word "cloudburst." We actually pernounced it as it's spelled, cloudburst, but it needs a little explanation. Cloudburst is like the cloud has a hole busted in the bottom of it and the water pours out. Often a cloudburst happens when the tater wagon turns over. There will be a flash of lightnin', and a BOOM in the sky when the tater wagon turns over, and you can hear the load of taters a-rollin' and a-rumblin'! Usually, in Ozark speech, we didn't use the word "burst." To us, things didn't burst, they busted. A bag didn't burst, it busted or tore open or ripped apart. A "tahr" didn't burst, it busted or blowed out! Lots of things that broke would be said to be busted. If you drop your watermelon, then most likely you've got a busted watermelon.

To mid-westerners, a fire may be glowing. But, to Ozarkers, the fire is glowin'. More properly, the fahr is a-glowin'. The "a" before a word is a way of easing into the word kind of rhythmically and gently, as in I'm a-goin' purty soon; or I'm a-fixin' to take the truck in fer noo tahrs; or I'll be a-workin' in the back forty this mornin'. Ozark ain't too hard to learn, but they don't teach it in school.

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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history, vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected] or call 621-1621.

Editorial on 07/01/2015