If you had a conversation with a person in 1770 would they understand?

[totallyfrozen]

Where there's a will, there's a way. If folks from the Northern states can communicate with the rednecks down in the 'white South'...anything's possible.

While I have a Southern relative who proudly refers to himself as a "red neck", it's generally considered a disrespectful derogatory term. When you add racism to it with the qualifier "white South", you pretty much have a post that's going on I get you in trouble.
Personally, I've been called Spic, cracker, honky, and "white boy". I don't like any of it.

I don't know how tough the moderators are in this forum, but I don't think it's worth testing.




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[EngProf]

While I have a Southern relative who proudly refers to himself as a "red neck", it's generally considered a disrespectful derogatory term. When you add racism to it with the qualifier "white South", you pretty much have a post that's going on I get you in trouble.
Personally, I've been called Spic, cracker, honky, and "white boy". I don't like any of it.

I don't know how tough the moderators are in this forum, but I don't think it's worth testing. QUOTE]

I agree 100% about the "redneck" and "white South" comment. I think I said so at the time, but if I didn't, I should have.

 

[HudsonHawk]

While I have a Southern relative who proudly refers to himself as a "red neck", it's generally considered a disrespectful derogatory term. When you add racism to it with the qualifier "white South", you pretty much have a post that's going on I get you in trouble.
Personally, I've been called Spic, cracker, honky, and "white boy". I don't like any of it.

I don't know how tough the moderators are in this forum, but I don't think it's worth testing.

Just a point of order, but where I'm from, being called a "cracker" is a term to be worn with pride. It is not derogatory in any way.

 

[BlueTrain]

I sometimes refer to myself as a redneck, being a very conservative person from the sticks, although my wife says I've actually very liberal. But either way, I am from West Virginia and I'm really more of a hillbilly, which term doesn't seem to be used that much anymore. It's almost old-fashioned, perhaps even politically incorrect among us conservatives. Don't know why, though.

I don't know how old the term is but there was a musical group called the "Beverly Hills Billies" that appeared in a few movies in the 1930s, long before the Beverly Hillbillies television show.

 

[Angus Forbes]

I think it was W. J. Cash (The Mind of the South) who came up with the term "millbilly" for those who lived in North Carolina textile-mill towns. That's another one you don't hear very often.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I sometimes refer to myself as a redneck, being a very conservative person from the sticks, although my wife says I've actually very liberal. But either way, I am from West Virginia and I'm really more of a hillbilly, which term doesn't seem to be used that much anymore. It's almost old-fashioned, perhaps even politically incorrect among us conservatives. Don't know why, though.

I don't know how old the term is but there was a musical group called the "Beverly Hills Billies" that appeared in a few movies in the 1930s, long before the Beverly Hillbillies television show.

The modern comedy caricature of a "hillbilly" is largely a product of the 1930s -- starting with the cartoons of Paul Webb, who established the visual mage of mountain folk as skinny, whistle-lipped scraggly-bearded loafers in tall cone-shaped hats, lounging on porches with jugs marked "XXX" in their hands, and fly-blown hound dawgs sleeping at their feet while their broad-shouldered kerchief-wearing wives pulled plows in the fields. Billy DeBeck exploited this image further when he sent Barney Google on the run to Appalachia in 1934, where he met his chicken-stealing card-cheating moonshining cousin Snuffy Smith. Al Capp was next, with Li'l Abner and Dogpatch. On the radio, Lum and Abner avoided the most egregious of these stereotypes, but it wasn't until the hillbilly craze was fully established in the mid-thirties that they really caught on as a lasting national act.

There is a hilarious scene in "Twenty Million Sweethearts," a Warner Bros musical comedy about radio, in which a "hillbilly act" auditions to broadcast, only for their dialects to reveal that the only hills their ancestors ever trod were the hills of Palestine.

 

[BlueTrain]

For some strange reason, those tall, cone-shaped hat also appear in German folk costumes, though generally in a comical way. They can be found in the souvenir shops at the Frankfurt airport, along with cuckoo clocks and all kinds of chocolates.

Stereotypes, unfortunately or not, are generally based on something real and I will testify that much of the way those who live in the Southern highlands is accurate. People still live in ancient log houses (not cabins, mind you), engage is activities of questionable legality (because it's nobody's business what they do), nurse long-standing feuds, marry close relations and so on. But that's generally true only of those descended from the original settlers from not really that long ago. Settlement in the Southern Appalachians, depending on precisely where you speak, only began after the Revolution and the Indians were dispersed. But the area where I'm from, for example, also includes many people whose parents or grandparents came from Italy. But everyone else considers themselves as the first and true Americans.

 

[sheeplady]

Where I grew up, you were a "hick" and you lived in the "sticks." Your relatives (and you were often related to everyone else, even if it was your 3rd cousin married their second cousin's ex) were "folk" and "kin" and sometimes "kinfolk." I remember a slight difference in usage... I think your kin were your direct relatives and your folk were those that married in; I may have that backwards. (It's been a long time since I heard talk like that, though, and a lot of that culture has been replaced by general culture.)

You described where you lived to outsiders by general region: the mountains, the North country, or the valley (this is where the city people lived). There was also an area called "the deep woods (deep sticks)" but people who lived there rarely came out of the "deep sticks." You didn't either if you were trespassing.

More citified people called my area the "boonies." By citified people I mean townspeople who lived in towns of 400 people or more.

A common insult was "dirt farmer" which amused me to no end as most were dairy farmers, not crop farmers (croppers). They grew crops for their cows, of course, but they didn't do that as their main income. My third grade teacher (who I didn't care for) used to insult the farm kids (me included) by suggesting our parents "scratched in the dirt" and we couldn't "wash the dirt off our faces." She also called me stupid a few times and told me I was so lazy I'd never graduate high school. My best friend had migranes and asked to go to the bathroom, she said no, he got up and was running to the sink and vomited (her screaming at him). She then came up while he was still on all fours and planted her foot firmly on his back and kept screaming at him. She's either older than the hills or dead now.

 

[BlueTrain]

That's interesting. I did hear the expression "old than the hills" a lot. But all the fine differences between various words was lost on me as someone still in school, although that was when I should have been learning those things.

I heard "the boonies" when I was in the army but not before. I don't actually remember anyone back home use the word "hillbilly" in any sense, but especially not in referring to themselves. After all, one rarely uses a slang term for referring to one's self except for humorous exaggeration and then only rarely. But anyone else is fair game. I lived in town and like you say, I was a city boy, the town having a population of about 7500, depending on the year. However, to be honest, it was much more city like (then) than living in the suburbs now or for that matter, living there now, when the downtown (or uptown, depending on which side of town you lived) is just a shell. Anyway, people who lived anywhere outside of town and came to town on Saturday to do their shopping (nothing was open on Sunday) might be referred to as "country jakes." Something that was countrified or rustic was "jakey."

None of my schoolteachers, at least one of whom was there when my mother was in school, were given to making any remarks about people or where they lived, to their credit. We didn't have any particular reason to be proud but we sure didn't have any reason to be ashamed of ourselves, any of us. Nobody used the word "hick," backwoods or the sticks, at least not often enough to make any impression on me. I also never any idea of a forest being the "deep, dark woods." To me it was cool and shady and not at all dark once your eyes got used to the light.

I thought my hometown was the most wonderful place in the world to grow up but my opinion of the region has changed a little because the region has changed a lot. It might be possible that I've changed a little in the meantime, too. It's been over fifty years.

 

[dnjan]

I grew up southwest of Chicago - outside of Cook County. The weathermen on the Chicago TV stations would frequently refer to the boonies, as in " ... and in the boonies ..." when describing the weather in the outlying areas. So boonies was just a term I grew up with.

 

[LizzieMaine]

In my town, backwoodsy people were called "harveys." Mostly because most of them we knew were named "Harvey." By extension, run-down rural districts were called "Harveytown."

I never heard the word "redneck" anywhere from anyone until the rise of "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "Smokey and the Bandit" made cornpone Southern stereotypes popular in the North.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I can recall my ethnic Irish Catholic grandparents in the 1960's referring to the residents of the Uptown area of Chicago as, "Mountain Williams." Nicer than saying, "hillbillies," apparently. That area at the time was a landing point for many Appalachian whites.

All that said, they really had more than a grudging admiration for those hillbilly people because they'd be the first to tell you that if one was your friend, he/ she would lay down their life for you if necessary. They had a neighbor of that persuasion with whom they were particularly close. She was hard working, had a heart of gold, and her son grew up to graduate college and become an Army officer. Never heard a bad word about her or her family uttered by my grandparents and that was rare: they ripped on everyone, including (especially!) their own siblings.

Never heard them or my parents employ the terms "rednecks" or "peckerwoods," as I recall.

 

[sheeplady]

I grew up in the Adirondacks. They say there's places up there that no person's ever looked at yet, but I don't believe it. It's over 6 million acres and has less than 150,000 permanent residents.

Very easy to get lost. Where I lived, it wasn't uncommon for people to get lost, particularly before the invention of personal satellite GPS devices). And we were downright developed compared to some areas... a mile outside of a village of nearly 200 people. Occasionally these people were never found, particularly if they weren't raised up there. Most of the population is crowded towards the lakes, half the land is state, and much of the private land is undeveloped. I can easily think of a handful of cases I remember the details of (everyone was encouraged to keep an eye out) as a kid they never found. (ETA: locals didn't get lost, or at least not permanently. Normally it was tourists, typically in my area, hunters.)

So when we said deep woods, we meant beyond the public paved roads, beyond the unpaved public dirt roads, beyond the unpaved private roads, and beyond the logger trucks. There's people up in those woods that don't want to be found, and they don't consider themselves lost. They do, however, come out occasionally. There's also those people who need to fly in/out of their property, or paddle.

So that is what deep woods means.