[...] but that was funny. I don't reckon they'd have any idea what a fellow with a couple of cooters in a toe sack might be fixin' to do, but somehow, I think they might pass on the soup...
I'm pickin up on what you're throwin down... But for the cooters, which I know, not so much from up here, but through my kin.
Most of those expressions I have heard out here in the Dakotas, too, but after The War, a lot of folks who had fallen victim to the carpetbaggers came out this way, and likely brought the expressions along.
Yep... it follows due west of the South, right into cowboy country in Texas, Okahoma and at the time, Kansas. From there, up the Rockies... There's a whole bunch of Western tradition and culture that springs right out of the south, and even straight out of those Scots-Irish up in the Appalachians, as those poor folk picked up and came west to seek their fortunes.
Even Western dance finds it's way in large part, from those Irish hillbillies. Wherever the fiddle and the banjo went, the music and dance went too.
When I first arrived in North Dakota, I was out in the northern part of the Red River Valley (of the North, for y'all Texans), which was highly settled by Norwegians. Most of the older folks still had the diphthong and consonant pronunciation of the old country, along with that singsong speech rhythm. The movie "Fargo" never quite got it, the best they did was sound like Reservation Canadians (eh).
Yep... The northern Rockies caught quite a bit from those Norwegians too... A whole lot of them around here.
It was a rough run for a little while. I was a lot more comfortable after I moved further west...
I come to it the other way around. I was born in Chicago, to my Illinois native father, and my Kansas farm girl mother... Moved out here young... Young enough to be just a bit late blooding my first kill, but early enough that few of my new friends had bagged their first deer - So the 'growing up' continued apace with them, with the exception of me having to get up to speed with fishing and farm life, and trapping in the creek and around the farmyard... which wasn't all that much.
But my mamma's kin are Southern by heritage - Kansas by way of Missouri, by way of Alabama/Mississippi... so a good bit of Southern manners, ethics, and food, were in me natural all the way along, as my mamma's folks were not far removed, not to say that Kansas is all that far removed anyhow...
I never did have trouble understanding folks here, as I was very used to my kin and their more southern drawl. But it didn't take long for me to adapt to Western speech at all.
