For this article, I went around my campus asking, “Do you have any questions about the south or southerners?” Well, I received a ton of questions but I decided that these were my top seven and that they should be addressed. My criteria for asking people is that you had to live above the Mason-Dixon line or past Kentucky because those are like, the southern boundaries. But here are the top seven questions I received and the answer I think will get my Southern point across.
1. Why do you add extra letters in your words?
Well, I’ll give you two answers: a funny answer and a serious answer. The funny answer is that when the north shortens their words such as car or water, those extra letters can’t just be left out to fend for themselves. So the letters find themselves in the south where we add them to our words. But seriously, most southerners don’t even realize we are doing it but it just happens. Words will be extended and drawn out because we don’t draw out ever vowel. We only draw out prominent vowel instead of the whole word just like the north removes certain letters.
2. Why do you flip out about snow?
Really… First of all, if you haven’t noticed, the south does not get a lot of snow to begin with. Meaning that we do not have the equipment to be prepared for snow and ice. Really the south is scared of ice because of the lack of ability to salt every road, main and back roads. The state can salt the main roads because the main roads are on maps, but when it comes to some back roads, they aren’t even on a map, meaning people may not get there to salt the road leading to more accidents.
3. Why do you need bread and milk when it snows?
Let me give you all a little history lesson on small towns in the south. Now as most northerners have noticed, big cities have some form of a convenient store almost everywhere. But for small towns, the closest store or grocery store may be a 30-minute drive verses climbing down from your apartment and walking across the street to a bodega. So southerners would go out to town once a week and get everything they would need for the week such as food, gas, cloth for sewing, or anything extra they may need. And because of this once a week trip, people would get more canned food than anything because it saves for months at a time.
Now when it snows, we have canned food to get us through the snow but what about the staples of southern food aka bread and milk? You can’t have biscuits without milk, sandwiches without bread, or literally anything with milk in it because you are snowed in and can’t get into town to the store. So this is why we flip out about getting bread and milk. We need the staples and with most small towns being far away from a larger town, we need to get the staples when we can before everyone else gets the food before us.
4. Why do you like NASCAR?
Most people don’t like NASCAR because they find it boring and stupid. But think about this, it is the easiest sport to watch and the simplest to understand. You have to follow 43 cars in a circle for X amount of laps. Those are the four most exciting left turns you will ever see in your life. You don’t have to keep up with three-pointers or goals or yellow cards or weather the ball was in the lines or not.
But even the history of NASCAR is cool because it has a history that most sports just don’t have. NASCAR got its start from bootlegging moonshine in the country and how people driving the moonshine eventually got really good at driving and thought that it would be a good idea to set up a track and just race against other moonshine drivers. One of the most famous bootlegging NASCAR driver named Junior Johnson is from Wilkes County, North Carolina, who ran moonshine for his family and now has 50 NASCAR wins and is in the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Personally, I love NASCAR because it is fun to watch and see who will come out of top but what other sport do you know that has the tallest, fastest, and longest roller coaster in the southeast?
5. Why are you all obsessed with sweet tea?
Sweet tea is in our blood, and drinking it is almost like receiving a blood transfusion. Seriously, the south just kind of got stuck with sweet tea. Around the 1890s, there was a cookbook which gave a recipe for the “first” pitcher of sweet tea. The recipe called for you to make a pitcher of hot unsweet tea, add sugar, and let it cool down for sweetness. Now thinking of the time frame, fridges were not the best cooling system and the south did not have a lot of money to buy better fridges. So what did we come up with: sugar!
Sugar is a great way to preserve almost anything and adding sugar does the same thing salt does for preservation. Sweet tea has a better shelf life than unsweet tea, meaning that the south wouldn’t have to constantly remake unsweet tea and use up material that may be used in other recipes. Also, sweet tea is much better than unsweet tea with simple syrup. #SweetTeaForLyfe
6. Do you even own shoes?
No…. No, I do not own shoes like a normal human being. I go to class, any of my meals, church, and literally anywhere where people are and I go barefoot.
Are you kidding me? Yes, I own shoes and yes I wear shoes but, personally, I choose not to most days. I love feeling the grass between my toes and jumping in puddles can ruin shoes, so why not do it barefoot? The south is not that far in the past that we can’t afford shoes. We do wear shoes but some people choose not too. But there are places where we are expected to wear shoes. We are expected to wear shoes anywhere that does not have trees, grass, dirt, and creeks meaning we wear shoes everywhere that isn’t outside. You wouldn’t want to walk into church barefoot or walk into a grocery store barefoot.
7. Why do you fight over which BBQ you like? Is there a difference?
Bless your heart, honey. Let me explain North Carolina BBQ. There are two kinds: Lexington style and Eastern style. Now, Lexington BBQ or Piedmont BBQ is anywhere west of Raleigh and Eastern is anywhere east of Raleigh… it pretty much divides the state exactly in half. Lexington BBQ uses a red sauce or a ketchup based sauce and can range from sweet to spicy to both. But Eastern BBQ sauce is a vinegar-base with no tomato sauce. Also, the section of the pig is different because Lexington uses the pork shoulder for the BBQ while Eastern uses literally the whole pig. I don’t think there is anything similar with each of the BBQ other than the use of a pig. Even the toppings for each BBQ sandwich differs from slaw to mayonnaise as a topping. “All the way” means that you get either barbecue slaw or mayonnaise slaw with barbecue sauce, which Lexington uses but Eastern uses just mayonnaise as a topping. There are so many differences in two types of BBQ that it become a state problem in 2006-2007. The population that likes Eastern BBQ got particularly livid that Lexington BBQ would become the “official” BBQ of the state. So in 2007, there was NC House Bill that was passed making Lexington the official BBQ of the Piedmont Region instead of the whole state officially divided the state into two separate BBQ loving areas by law.
