Howdy, young feller! Come set a spell by th’ far …
November 3, 2014 8:58 AM   Subscribe

…H’it all happened along back ’bout jes’ afore’n th’ depression … mebbe 1931…

Welp, Doc Wilson, he bottled it up ’til one day, he finally snapt. He had a farmer’s shotgun he was allus wavin’ at folks. Ever’ tub must stand on its own bottom … don’t wanna talk ’bout that no more. H’it’s sartain Melvin was as strong’s a wolf. Man – he might like t’ been fit t’ be tied, but he’d make th’ trip over t’ th’ fish house ever’ day anyhow. Those were th’ days. An’body c’da tol’ yuh Clarence run fer mayor. I ’member th’ circus along yonder near th’ lake. He come up an’ he – or was’t t’other time? … Well, I reckon he tripped an’ fell plumb over his’n chair. I tell yuh, too late now, though. He sure as hell din’t win. I reckon that was when that slimy Delbert McCoy holed up at Bent Creek. He made sev’ral enemies. Had a bowie knife on ’im, too. Later, we shot ’im in th’ left eye way out at th’ pharmacy. Not much choice, really.
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posted by Iridic (15 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Bill Lee don't come 'round these parts no more.
posted by Ferreous at 9:21 AM on November 3, 2014


I don't think it's a contraction but a dialectical rendering attempt.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:28 AM on November 3, 2014


Maybe it's a glottal stop? Charming whatever it is.
posted by echo target at 9:39 AM on November 3, 2014


Needs just a little Tim Sample to pull from and they'd have recreated the Maine Humor masterpiece Burt & I.
posted by Nanukthedog at 9:56 AM on November 3, 2014


I think the Simpsons reference to go with here is the filmstrip playing in the visitors' centre on Mount Useful that Marge slowly backs out of.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:19 AM on November 3, 2014


Okay, as a fan of 19th-century dialect humor, this OP quote is all over the map. The guy's an Arkansas hillbilly, he's a Nevada miner, he's a Georgia sharecropper, and I'm pretty sure there's some sea-cured Maine lobsterman in there as well. He's Simon Wheeler, Mr. Dooley, Sam Slick, and Uncle Remus all stitched into some horrible lurching salt-of-the-earth Frankenstein, killing villagers and delivering homespun homilies over their broken corpses 'bout how it strikes him in all p'ints how fire is tol'ble bad. Do not nohow want.
posted by ormondsacker at 10:53 AM on November 3, 2014 [9 favorites]


The "h'it" thing is referencing dialects that insert an h before an initial vowel sound.
posted by ocherdraco at 11:34 AM on November 3, 2014


Funny, ormondsacker, all those things are why I love it.
posted by echo target at 11:59 AM on November 3, 2014


That's inauthentic frontier gibberish, and it needed to be said.
posted by Devonian at 12:25 PM on November 3, 2014


Probably best paired with Justin Wilson-style fake Cajun pronunciation.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 1:05 PM on November 3, 2014


ormondsacker: "He's Simon Wheeler, Mr. Dooley, Sam Slick, and Uncle Remus all stitched into some horrible lurching salt-of-the-earth Frankenstein, killing villagers and delivering homespun homilies over their broken corpses 'bout how it strikes him in all p'ints how fire is tol'ble bad. "

...I'd watch this movie?
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:10 PM on November 3, 2014 [2 favorites]


I grew up in a teeny tiny town named Bear Lake, and while many of our residents were yokels, none of them talked like this.

Well, maybe Frenchie. Did I ever tell you about Frenchie? We called him Frenchie cuz he talked in French. At least we think it were French. Weren't none of us who knew any more French than you could learn from a cereal box or from watching the French learning channel. Not that any of us did that. If we was bored with the regular channels, there're an English learnin' channel. Didn't make much more sense than the French one, I tell you, but at least it didn't make sense in English.

Anyway, Frenchie, I was sayin', we called 'im Frenchie cuz he were French. Or maybe not. Makes no nevermind, twenty ways. He lived next door to th' Anders-es. They were a hoot an a half, they were. Cept that one boy. He was a dimwitted, mangy nincompoop. He drunk like a fish. I heared tell he up an’ died by th’ time th’ hailstorm struck. We strung his sorry ass up, way over by Bent Creek. Yuh best b’lieve, folks was right sick ’cuz he’d ignored it ’til it blowed up in his face. All’s well whut ends well. Ye’d go along up right by th’ dry-goods store an’ see Melvin ever’ night, a-lookin’ sad. He had a way with fixin’ up machines. Don’t wanna talk ’bout that no more … I seen it all. We tried t’ reason with ’im. Shoot, people git all riled up, an’ fit t’ be tied ’cuz he’d carried a great burden fer years. Not much choice, really – I’m a-tellin’ yuh, let bygones be bygones, I allus say.

Err, what was I saying?
posted by jacquilynne at 5:01 PM on November 3, 2014 [4 favorites]


Does anyone besides me find this kinda gross? It's not racism exactly but it sure is cousins with it.
posted by Andrhia at 6:15 PM on November 3, 2014


Dialect humor was heavily classist, for sure*. There are poor and uneducated people from various parts of the country, they talk funny but are (generally) wise and frequently get the better of / see things more clearly than posh educated city folk. Up to your personal scale of ethics how you navigate that.

It's worth noting that dialect humor is so heavily ingrained in the Western psyche that the internet has re-invented it twice this century in an attempt to keep goofy broken English alive while purging it of actual existing cultural-group signifiers. Why else is, say, "such many, very yes" funny, if not that broken English is not the way educated people talk?


*Aside from when it was actually racist, but they're mostly going for poor white speech patterns in Bear Lake here. Mostly.
posted by ormondsacker at 6:54 PM on November 3, 2014


ormondsacker: "Dialect humor was heavily classist, for sure."

Here it is. I don't think it needs to be. There's plenty to be made fun of in upper-class speech, but that seems to be much more commonly done in the UK than in the US, somehow.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:59 PM on November 4, 2014


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