Guessing What These Southern US Words Mean

hello i'm laurence and i'm on a quest to uncover all of the memos that britain and america lost in the pond and one of those memos pertains to words you know with the world being the way that it is i've been getting quite nostalgic recently nostalgic for my youth nostalgic for when hair gels still have meaning for me and nostalgic for the early days of my youtube channel because you see the first ever lost in the pond video was me trying to clumsily work out the meaning behind some obscure slang and it occurred to me at 3am this morning that i haven't done a video like that ever since and so now that i've lived in the midwest for quite a while i thought why not broaden my reach why not step out of the expert mode once in a while and put myself before the mercy of the internet and so to reignite things in this regional guessing game i decided a good place to start would be the south and so my team has thrown together a list of southern slang words that they found on one of those listicle websites meaning that these words could be of questionable accuracy and i a person who spent very little time in the southern united states i'm going to do my best to guess their meaning boggy buggy could mean many things it could be a rabbit you know like boggs bonnie it's like an amalgamation of the two and i imagine this buggy has been run over by an actual buggy so probably not that's very deeply specific or it could mean it could be one of those things that you push a baby around in what do you like a pram or something i don't have kids so i don't know how that works but i think it's one of those isn't it because i think that america has a few different terms for that contraption just as britain does and i believe that's what southerners call it okay and for all of these i will look up the meaning in real time this was in fact a shopping cart or shopping trolley as we say in england sometimes you put babies in them okay fixing or fixing without a g just it doesn't mean to mend something right it means i'm getting ready to do something as in i am fixing to go and you know i don't know why i'm doing this start a fight down at the bar because i'm in the middle of a country song i suppose and that's what it means uh i heard that one i think in films before i moved to the u.s so i'm quite aware of that one i've probably heard it in the midwest i bet that's true of a lot of the ones here let's just confirm that i'm correct i am indeed correct is it druthers or druthers dr druthers right so druthers to me has to be one of those portmanteaus where you take one word and another word and you sort of combine them to make one singular word and my belief here is is that somebody's taking the word brothers and the word dream and has made druthers and that would make no sense the real truth of the matter is according to this is that druthers is usually used in a phrase like if i had my druthers as in if i had it my way so an example would be if i had my brothers i would cheat and look these answers up before doing the video hoe cake sounds like something you should not call your significant other and he's probably actually a type of cake i think it is i think i've seen this in a list of american desserts but i don't know what it entails hoe cakes look like pancakes but taste like dense cornbread you're supposed to serve it with greens and corn apparently ah yes uh catawompus i've heard this before in fact i think when i lived in indiana i heard people saying catty wampa so it could be regional or it could just be you know choose your favorite variant but this basically means that something i think is diagonal from something or it's or it's a skew in some capacity all right so let's see it describes something that's askew awry or diagonal as in we tried setting it up straight but it ended up catawompus what an amazing word piddling that it sounds like a euphemism to me to me piddling sounds like something you'd tell your kid to say when they want to go for a number one i was in the middle of piddling in the street when i was caught by the superintendent i don't know why i admitted that but i've also heard piddling as in piddling around you know when you're not really doing much you're just sort of piddling around because i'm not very busy i am busy because i'm a youtube sensation but in the off chance that i'm not busy which hasn't been the case in 20 years then it could be said that i've been piddling around indeed it means neither of those things in the south it means apparently something small or trivial an example being that you might get something more than a piddling raise from your company this year i like that one i'm gonna use that more often though i suppose now if you see me in a gents toilet and i tell you that i'm piddling it takes on a whole different meaning i know this one i know do you know why i know this one because i remember stone cold steve austin used it once in wrestling and i didn't then know what it meant so i looked it up and it just takes us back to the bathrooms to the toilets where we were earlier metaphorically and it basically means toilet of course i just have to check that stone cold steve austin isn't a liar and indeed he's not a liar it is a bog a toilet a loo no he didn't wrestle a toilet he tried to flush somebody's head down one once i think do hickey i am genuinely familiar with this word there are just there are so many american english coinages that employ consecutive instances of the letter o and this is another example the problem is i can't remember what it means do hickey do hickey do hickey do hickey it doesn't mean go forth and bite somebody's neck although i can see why you might think that it just means isn't it some sort of object doesn't it mean some kind of object i'm thinking of another word i what is the other word i'm thinking of that's similar to that like a thingamajig this is really irritating i can't remember what it is i'm gonna we'll have to look it up so let's have a look uh so calling something a doohickey means that you forget what the item is actually called so the word is synonymous with phrases like thingamajig and what's it hush up is presumably self-explanatory and hopefully isn't something that you're yelling at your screen because it's a combination it seems of shut up and hush it just means be quiet indeed it is that and this site seems to claim that it's a polite form of shut up i'm not sure that's true they both they both sound a little bit mean plum but with a b on the end so it's not the fruit presumably unless that is the southern way of spelling it and they just haven't told the rest of the world other than that i mean you can get like a plum new job right but i think that's in most of the english-speaking world so i don't think it would be that i mean i suppose it depends if this is a noun or a verb or an adjective i have no context for these things plum in this sense just means oh gosh darn it oh plum oh crumbs you know it rhymes with crumbs so it could be that oh plum i can't get into the commode right now because there are too many people in there i'm getting really carried away by this toilet metaphor let's have a look what it really means south of the mason dixon line plum means completely totally so i was you know wildly off the mark with that one an example they give i'm plumb tired after this long day if you'd have asked me to guess the phrase hopping john just two years ago i wouldn't have had a clue but last year in a video i gave my verdict on hopping john hopping john is a food item that some southerners will eat at new year for good luck and it contains black eyed peas and rice and it was really really nice actually i genuinely would eat that again but it's not something that's well known outside of the south or at least certainly not up here in the midwest and i definitely never heard of it when i lived in britain washitaria sounds like cafeteria just with the word wash at the start instead of cafe so it's a place where you go and wash your food what makes more sense actually now i thought about it is it it could be a name for what i would call a laundrette in the uk and what we call a laundromat here in chicago i'm glad i amended that by the way because a cafeteria where you wash your food sounds like a really odd concept a washateria is indeed a chain of laundromats in texas specifically and then took off as a synonym for laundromat itself hissy that is a word that i've used to describe my wife's cousin chad's vocal style but also you use that term in the sense of hissy fit to throw a wobbler to have a conniption or a conniption fit so i'd imagine that if hissy is being used on its own it's a shortening perhaps of hissy fit that's sort of correct although the example they give suggests that the word is used in a sentence that's structured slightly differently he's getting hissy because we didn't stop for food all right one to the last one this one is mudding and mudding could mean one of two things it could be an alternative to the word muddling so muddling through just like i'm muddling through these answers it could be another it could be a way of saying we are making muddy butters it's a particular activity involves racing through terrains that are you guessed it muddy like wet fields and lake beds so the vehicle gets totally caked with dirt that sounds amazing and you know that i believe that because i almost went high-pitched well that's it for this episode let me know in the comments below if you knew the meaning of all of these southern phrases and indeed if they were in fact all southern i'm laurence brown you can follow me on twitter at lost in the pond us and don't forget to subscribe to my channel so that my videos don't get lost in the pond all of these videos are made possible by my patrons so if you are fixing to support lost in the pond you can do so today at patreon.com lost in the pond until the next video later y'all [Music] you

Channel: Lost in the Pond

Views: 175,734

Keywords: Laurence Brown, America, southern US, southern words

Id: JHkKkYIRZXY

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 11 2022