What Eh Law means in Appalachia

hello my name's tipper and today we're going to be talking about some of the rich colorful appalachian language specifically words and phrases that start with the letter e i'll be using the dictionary smokey mountain english to for the words that i'm going to share today you can find this book online it's very expensive because it's out of print i've had mine for a long time over 10 years however they're supposed to publish a new one a new edition of it sometime this month in june so maybe you can be on the lookout for that if you are interested in it because i believe it'd be be much more affordable for you so we'll start with e in the letter e this first one is one i've never heard of but i just thought it was really interesting it was early candlelight is the the entry early candlelight so it says dusk that's what it's describing as dusk we would say dusky dark it's almost dusky dark but so in 1923 in math's tall tales accordingly it was narrated around that there would be preaching every night at early candlelight beginning with the new moon in may so they were going to have preaching and they're saying it would begin at early candlelight so i'm this again that's one i've never heard i'll be interested to see if you've heard that one before this one is really common where i live and i can't believe it's not common all across the united states so you'll have to tell me if you're familiar with it but it's just to ease around so if you ease around something you're you're moving slowly and quietly kind of slipping you know slipping around so 1940 haun's hawks done the old man and ad kept easing off by the littles till they finally went on away 1961 semen arms of mountain my mammy could tell when there was a witch easing around the baby get that dry colic the butter just wouldn't come and old brindle would go smolicking around kicking up her heels that's a funny one 1995 adams come go home he started to ease off to the side trying to get a car between him and the wildly in chester so somebody was acting so he was trying to ease out of the way but that one so i just can't believe that one's not common everywhere so easing powders this is an interesting one um pertinent powders also called that or resting powder well it's a medicine is what it is so let's see 1974 fink bits of mountain speech a drug to ease pain they ought to give him some easing powders so i've never heard of easing powders maybe i don't know maybe i have or maybe i've read it in a book but pap and granny both used the word easy we'll see here in a minute maybe it's maybe it'll go over that one if not i'll tell you how they used easy so the next entry is easter bush so an insta easter bush is a forsythia what we would call yellow bells we didn't call them easter bushes we called them yellow bells i have a video about that if you'd like to see that one then the easter flower again we called a lot of people i know called daffodils easter flowers we just called them daffodils or jonquils granny would call them jonquils i also have a video about that one here's the one easy that i was talking about that sometimes pap and granny would use so it's really it's can and connected with like the ease and powders that was helping your pain but it's to relieve your pain so maybe if pap was sick or granny and and i was asking them you know if there was okay before i left is there something else i could do for them they'd say no i'm easy right now you go on home tipper i'm easy right now so that was their way of saying they were doing okay at the moment so the dictionary says 1997 montgomery collection i got easy the dose of saying that dose of medicine made her get easy and that was by brown so they took a dose of medicine that made them get easy eating table that's a funny one just the way you would describe your i don't know if i'd say eating table i've heard that though he's at the eat sit down at the eating table but anyway it's just really describing where you eat your meals so the dinner table is the explanation in the dictionary to eat if you get eat up with something you get bit you're getting bit all over you get eat up i get eat up by chiggers in the summertime they just love me all i have to do is walk through the yard and i've got eat up with chiggers so eat up to bite badly 1939 hall collection deep creek north carolina it was one of our bear hounds a black and tan hound and he was just eat up bloody all over from a bear fight so the bear dog got in a fight with the bear hartford tennessee he come up to a party had been a fight and a bear with dogs and it had eaten up their dogs in a laurel bed a lot of fighting the rest of those i think are about dogs too this is an interesting one it's not really a word it's just more of a grammatical thing is that we add ed to a lot of words that don't really need them i mean they're they're it's not right it's a different um let's see if i can think of one like bloat we would say it blowed those trees down instead of we should say you know the trees were blown down so that's an interesting one it says added to verbs to form past tense and past partici participle forms added to verbs to form past tense and past participle forms so their examples are blow grow no teach and throw so i've definitely heard bloat i've said that one myself growed you sure have growed node i know that i don't know why i did it i knew i know that teached i don't know if i don't say that one but i've definitely heard it and then throwed i definitely say throwed he throwed it out the door he was so upset he throwed it out the door edgeways is an interesting one so we would say edgeways instead of edgewise it's really just edgewise i would say see put it over there edgeways and it'll fit if you put it edgeways up against that wall it'll fit just perfectly if you'll try that one so edgeways is one that's common where i'm at this next one is like an interjection and it it conveys so much emotion i've heard it my whole life i say it myself it's one it's what we say when there just ain't nothing else to say typically it's said in like a bad situation when they're just you just you maybe you've already said you're sorry or you hate it or you wish it hadn't happened and there just ain't nothing else to say about it except you say law so for people that can't understand me i'm saying e h and then law l-a-w ella so here's what the dictionary says about it says it's a mild oath for range of emotions expressed so 1965 dictionary queens english an interjection used in responding to a speaker it can indicate agreement puzzlement encouragement to continue or melancholy endorsement for example one person may say what do you think of the price and caught it price of cotton the response may well be at all so for me mostly i've heard it in the how it describes the melancholy uh expression kind of like they're just just i don't there's nothing else words are not going to convey how bad it is and all i can just do is say law i have a really neat recording i'll link to it down below if you're interested in hearing it's kind of hard to hear but it's still precious to me but in pabst last months you know that i knew in the last year of his life that he wasn't going to live i knew it was coming so every time i'd hear him talking not every time but often i would record him so there was one day spring of the year and i was at home and i seen him and you know we worried about him because his heart was so bad that we didn't it's kind of weird you know you get to where you don't even want them to get out of the chair even though they need to get out of the chair because they need to continue with their life and keep moving but anyway he was i'd seen out my window that he had the tiller out and i thought lord he don't need to be telling the garden so i took off down there well he couldn't get it cranked this was the first time he was cranking it from having to sit all winter and he was just getting frustrated and he was kicking at it and trying to crank it and just carrying on and i was like oh my gosh you know he's gonna have a heart attack right here if he don't quit this he's exerting himself too much well i texted my uncle henry and was like are you at home can you come up here so anyway henry did and henry helped him get it started but in the meantime they talked and they were talking about all kinds of stuff so i started just while i was standing there started recording them with my phone and so in that they're talking about a situation actually from years and years ago nothing to do with today but in that pap says oh cause that's just you know what else you gonna say about it it was just a really sad situation that happened when they were young and growing up here in our where i live in this hauler but they were talking about a long time ago but i'll link to that just in case that you'd like to hear it but that's one of my it's not my favorite interjection because it always means sad but it's just something that immediately if i hear somebody say that it makes me feel at home if that makes sense because it is so common let's see i i wrote about this one one time on the blind pig in the acorn and i've not ever heard it but i really liked it so it's an elijah room a larger room is same as a stranger room 1995 trout historical buildings whether they charged for the service or not mountaineers created little barriers between themselves and their overnight guests some cades cove residents framed in their porches for this purpose and called them stranger rooms or elijah rooms for the biblical character a latch string in the front door of the home pulled in locked the family in and the stranger out so it was like a little area that they would fix so they knew strangers might come by and need a place to spend the night and they didn't want to turn them away but they didn't want them to sleep in the same area where they were sleeping so they made these little rooms and they called them elijah room or a stranger room i've never heard that growing up but i just thought it was really neat so please let me know if you've heard it the empress tree the princess tree so of course it has a latin name that i can't say but i wrote about it one time on the blind pig and acorn too i'll link to that because it's a really interesting story about it how it how it started so if you if you first let me describe the tree if you've grown uh drove through the nantahala gorge or a lot of the gorgeous through appalachia in my area have them i think they're in the ocoee too but out towards asheville around there so it's sometimes called the princess tree too but they have really big leaves and they have like a purple little bloom well they're not native they're not native to to appalachia at all they were brought back here i think they're from i can't remember now i need to go back and read my own post if they're from uh somewhere in asia anyway but they were imported here and then they do spread in certain places well i won't spoil the story for you you'll have to go read it on my on my blog but i'll link to it but it is a great story about how one come to be under my kitchen window and how i couldn't let it stay there but then how it took me on this journey of a story of learning how it got to my mountain hauler and who who a man i never met before in my family how he brought it and why he brought it so it's really interesting for me and it's almost like he'd at the end of my journey of finding out about it it was almost like he had come up and knocked on my kitchen window and said hey come find out about me you'll you know you need to know this and i'm so glad i did all that of course just because i learned about him but that tree the one tree that's connected to him that was further down the road it is now gone it's dead it's gone so if i hadn't wrote about it and documented it and took a picture of it nobody never believed it anyway enough about that okay so uh end of one's row that's just a phrase so if you're the at the end of your row you know you're at the limit of what you can tolerate you've done and tolerated all you all you can the end of your row if you're at the end of your row so that's an interesting one i like this one the episodics so episodics means you're sick it's kind of like a joking name it's not really um a specific illness but if you're sick maybe you've got a cold or a sore throat or something like that and you're just feeling bad somebody will say well you got the episodics some people call it the episode too so episodics or episode so it's just a humorous way of talking about being sick um evening i think the evening is an interesting one we say of an evening and oven morning but evening in appalachia and it's the way i grew up it's not like today we think of evening like after six o'clock at night or something no evening was after meal time after dinner dinner was it served at 12 you know in the middle of the day after dinner and between supper that was evening that's the evening if you're gonna i'm gonna do i'm gonna go out and pull weeds in the of an evening after eating dinner it's not really at night it's during the daytime so that evening in appalachia in my area of appalachia for sure was describing that time between dinner or lunch as you would say today and supper that was the evening so that's interesting i'll see if you are familiar with that usage so the middle of the evening is about three o'clock that was 1939 from the hall collection cades cove mountain people for southern mountain people evening begins at 12 o'clock noon for them the morning and the evening are the day as is it is it is recounted in genesis of a world still in the making 1956 chapman folk retain if you ask him would you like to ride into town this evening he will expect you to go somewhere between noon and sundown for to him those are the evening hours after that it is night that was how it was when i was young so that's that's the same and i still look at it like that if i say evening i mean i might mean two o'clock i might mean four o'clock this one is one the last one that i'll share with you today is one that i've wrote about on the blind pig in the acorn too i think i guess i've used it in a vocabulary test and it's not one that i grew up here and it's one i said i was going to start saying and make it part of my everyday language but i have not done that i should but everly and what a wonderful word everly so that means always constantly 1916 calms old early english it has everly been the custom 1943 justice bluebird fearsome news it everly is fire on the mountain so everly always constantly you've probably done figured it out but if you hadn't everly i will everly be talking about appalachian language because it just means so much to me and i enjoy it so much i hope you do too i hope you'll leave a comment and let me know which of these videos which of these uh words or phrases you were familiar with maybe which of them you'd never even heard of or that you thought was unusual but as always mostly i just hope you'll keep dropping back by as i celebrate appalachia

Channel: Celebrating Appalachia

Views: 38,526

Rating: 4.9848228 out of 5

Keywords: Appalachian mountains, Appalachia, Appalachian language, Appalachian accent, unusual words used in the mountains, unusual words from Appalachia, funny southern sayings, southern accent, dictionary of smoky mountain english, how to do an Appalachian accent, Appalachian Mountain Talk, Appalachian phrases, Appalachian Dictionary, Mountain Accent, Appalachian vocabulary test, Southern Appalachian Accent, accents, eh law meaning, words in Appalachia that start with E

Id: 0z5ana0HsxI

Length: 15min 14sec (914 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021