30 Appalachian Sayings Nobody Uses Anymore (Three Were Coded Warnings)

🔗 93 things every Appalachian grandfather knew. How many are left in you? https://burlsizemore.com The night I was nine, my grandfather looked up from his supper and told me to go see if the hens were laying. It was full dark, and every child up our holler knew that hens do not lay in the dark. I went anyway. When I came back in, a strange car was gone from our road, and my grandmother had been crying. That sentence was a code. It was one of three old sayings in our family that did not mean what they said at all. The rest of the country laughed at the way we talked. Fixing to. Might could. Afeared. A mess of beans. I will be there directly. But most of those words are older than this country. Some of them are the English they spoke in London four hundred years ago, and the mountains kept them after everybody else let them go. So here are thirty of the old sayings we used up our holler, what they really meant, where they came from, and which three were warnings in disguise. My grandfather kept a ledger, and out in the margins he wrote down how a thing was done. Ninety three of those old ways are in the book, each one with the reason it worked. If your family had a saying that meant something nobody outside the house understood, tell me down below what it was, and what it really meant. https://burlsizemore.com