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3:22am April 26, 2014

Okie problem #428

clatterbane:

youneedacat:

Not realizing until your twenties that waller is spelled wallow.  Creating a strange division in your head where waller is what pigs do in mud, and wallow is what people do in self-pity, and they can’t possibly be the same word?  Because words you learn from reading, and words you learn from talking, don’t sound or spell the same.

Yep, I still can’t bring myself to write (much less say) that somebody lives up anything but a holler, because they are functionally different words. I was probably in my teens before I realized how it was “properly” spelled. For that matter, where I grew up, you usually have a hollow tree, etc., so I probably would call them almost different words. (ETA: More like “holla”, but still. Different pronunciation.)

Don’t recall having the same problem with waller/wallow, for some reason.

Yeah, I was just listening to one version of “The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore” and was being really weirded out by someone saying “I was born and raised at the mouth of the Hazzard Hollow” instead of “Hazzard Holler”.  And I’m not even from around there (my folks are originally Ozark, not Appalachian), but the proper usage must have crept into my brain somehow.  It sounds like two different words to me too FWIW.