You can tell a lot about a person not just by what they say, but how they say it. For instance, if you heard a person say, "later this morning I'm going to go to the homeless shelter so that I can work during their lunch feeding people." You would probably think, what a generous person. If you heard the same person say "I'm fixing to go down to the homeless shelter so that I can work during their lunch feeding people", you'd think.... Oh! A generous Texan. If that same person said "I'm fixin' to take this deer that I just dressed out to the homeless shelter and feed some folks", you'd probably think.... Ahhhh.... A generous East Texan.
I heard a story on the news the other day that the Texas accent is dying. It made me a little sad. For those of you who know me well, this might come as a surprise since you have probably heard me say that I believe a heavy accent is a sign of laziness. I have always felt that if a person living in a major metropolitan area wanted to sound smarter to non-Texans, they needed to get rid of a heavy accent and I don't believe it is that difficult to do. I think that I still have a Texas accent. But I don't believe it is a heavy one. Meanwhile I know people who have lived in Dallas for 30 years who sound like they just walked out of Tenaha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenaha,_Texas or Chireno http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chireno,_Texas. What's up with that? I do have to admit that after about 10 minutes in Nacogdoches http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacogdoches,_Texas I am right back to talking the way I did when I was 12. That was back in the days when I would speak a sentence to someone from outside of Texas and they would ask me to say it again just for the laugh. But as soon as I return to Dallas, I start talking like me again. I don't think that a Texas accent is bad, to the contrary, I think it is good. But I do believe that there is a time and a place for everything. In a small town in any part of Texas, you should have an accent. But in Dallas or Houston, you sound kind of dumb when you have a heavy accent.
The guy on the news said that it is dying because there are so many people living in Texas now who are from different places. Ummmm... duh! I hardly know anyone in my circle of friends that I talk to regularly who is from Texas. There just aren't many life long native Texans left. On the news they also said that "fixin' to" is going away. That, my friends, is a problem. There is no more perfect phrase in the English language than "fixin' to". It says in two words what could take 7 or 8 words to say otherwise. You can either say, "I'm fixin' to go to work." Or you can say "The next thing I'm going to do after I finish writing this is go to work." They both mean the same thing. With either sentence you knew that I was going to work as soon as I finished what I was currently doing. But through the miracle of "fixin' to" it only took me 6 words to say it as opposed to the 16 words it took without using the wonder phrase.
You see, I may have gotten rid of most of my East Texas accent years ago, but I will never do away with "fixin' to". Why would anybody get rid of such a perfect phrase? It doesn't make sense. I used to work for this mean, hateful, horrible, store manager whose name I won't mention but who still works at the former employer who shall not be named. He was from somewhere in the northeast, and I don't mean Bonham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonham,_Texas, and he worked at the Prestonwood store in the 90's. I'm sure that several of you know exactly who I am talking about. Anyway, the mean, horrible, hateful man always made fun of the Texans when we said "fixin' to". Until he started making fun of me I didn't even know that other people didn't say "fixin' to". I couldn't figure out how people in other states could even relate a point if they didn't use that phrase. Once we tried to explain to him why it was such a perfect phrase. He continued to make fun of us. When I was fortunate enough to get transferred out of that store he was still a jerk and all of the Texans still disliked him. His being a jerk wasn't completely due to his disdain of our perfect phrase, but that didn't help.
The fact that I said the mean, horrible, hateful store manager was from "somewhere in the northeast" rather than from Pennsylvania or New Jersey or wherever he was from is telling. I didn't know what state he was from because it doesn't matter. All of those states up there are the same. One blends into another. What difference does it make if you are from Pennsylvania or New Jersey if you can drive all the way across your state and go to work in another state daily. But if you want to drive across my state, you better pack a lunch because you are going to be driving for a while. If you have pride in your northeastern state that you chose not to live in, I don't mean to be ugly about it. I'm just saying that you obviously made a decision to live in Texas for a reason. Some of us still talk a little funny here and if it's all the same to you we might just keep it that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment