Appalachia Sayings, Words, and Phrases

Every Holler Has Its Own Words

Y'all, if you grew up in these mountains, you already know this: how somebody talks can tell you where they're from. 

Here's the part nobody likes to talk about. A lot of us learned young to turn that voice off.

We code switch. We talk one way at home and another way at school, at a job interview, in a meeting at work. Somewhere along the line we got the message, sometimes said out loud sometimes not, that mountain talk sounds uneducated. That if you want to be taken seriously in a classroom or a corporate setting, you'd better flatten it out, drop the sayings, and talk like everybody else.

And so we do. Most of us are good at it. But here's the cost: when our kids hear home words treated like wrong words, they quit using them. And when the words go, a piece of who we are goes with them. These sayings aren't just cute phrases, they're how our grandparents and great-grandparents talked. They're living history you can't put in a museum.

Keeping them doesn't mean putting on an act or that we’re uneducated. It just means not being embarrassed. Use the work voice at work if you have to, most of us do, but let the home voice stay home-sized. Teach your kids the words, phrases, and sayings. Laugh about them. Pass them down on purpose, because they won't pass themselves down by accident anymore. This is our heritage and it’s time to be proud of the way we talk!

A Few of Ours

Here are a few we use and hear right here in Western North Carolina, and if your family says them differently, well, that's kind of the whole point of this post.

"Madder than a wet hen:” Somebody is furious. Not just annoyed. Ruffled up, fired up, and let everybody around them know it. 

"Side-goggling:" Looking at somebody sideways. That suspicious, squinty look you give a person when you're not really sure about them yet.

"Fixin' to:" About to. "I'm fixin' to head to the store" means it's about to happen... eventually. Folks trace this one back to old English the early settlers carried over, and it stuck in the mountains long after other places let it go.

"Cattywampus:" Crooked, off-kilter, all out of whack. A picture hanging sideways is cattywampus.

Put Your Mountain Talk to the Test

On our newest episode of Appalachia Ramblin', Sam, Ayla, and I put each other on the spot with a trivia game built out of these sayings: "madder than a wet hen," "side-goggling," and a whole bunch more. We traded stories, argued over definitions, and laughed at ourselves plenty. And Ayla, she learned some new vocabulary!

🎧 Watch or listen to the newest episode!

Come test yourself, and then tell us: which ones does your family say differently? Because I promise you, somebody's mamaw two hollers over has a word for it that you've never heard.