It's Suppertime, Y'all!!

Through the years I have dropped a few of the words I used in my childhood. I don’t know whether that’s because I moved from South Carolina to North Carolina in middle school and found a whole new set of colloquialisms or because I attended a college which had an inordinate number of students from up North. Maybe it was too many semesters as an English major where they frowned on anything that wasn’t “proper.”

But, for the most part, I continue to use words and phrases that I grew up with. I’ve become fascinated lately with those particular language choices

I’d never heard the evening meal described as “dinner” until I heard it from a guy I dated my freshman year of college -- which also happened to be my very first time in an Italian restaurant. That’s another story, but suffice to say it involved being very poor in high school and having been raised on soul food staples like okra and butter beans! The meal we ate at night was “supper” and the noon meal was always “lunch.”

There was only one deviation from that culinary linguistic rule and that was on Sunday when we ate “dinner” at lunchtime. Maybe we called it dinner out of respect for the Lord’s Day; although, I couldn’t help but notice that we didn’t celebrate The Lord’s Dinner during Holy Communion.

After the big Sunday “dinner," other men might have sat on their sofa but after eating Mama’s pork chop potato casserole and homemade strawberry shortcake, my daddy plopped down on the “couch” to watch the football games.

The word "couch" comes from the French word, coucher, which means "to lie down.” The original couches were for one person. Maybe that’s why people feel more relaxed on a couch -- more inclined to stretch out and want the space all to themselves.

“Sofa," on the other hand, is an Arabic word that derives from the word for government meetings, diwan (divan is another name for a sofa). Sofas were a raised section of floor covered in cushions created specifically for those meetings. Seating for a government meeting doesn’t sound terribly comfortable. A sofa sounds more formal as if you’d be afraid to sit on it -- like the piece of furniture in my Aunt Myrtle’s living room -- covered in plastic and kept behind closed doors.

Then, there’s the word “y’all.” I remember constantly trying to explain to my college dorm mates (again, mainly from above the Mason-Dixon) what it meant. They were used to youns and youse guys and couldn’t quite grasp why we Southerners were so lazy that we couldn’t say “you all” so everyone would know what we meant.

 It really irked them when we combined their two least favorite Southern words, “hey” and “y’all” in the same sentence. “Hey, y’all” was enough to send all of them youns and youse guys running for cover! I don’t know how many times I was scolded that, “hey was for horses!” to which my favorite retort was, “Yeah, and us Southerners are all thoroughbreds, y’all!”

No, I didn’t grow up in a house that had a “sofa” and where families ate "dinner." We ate our meals at the kitchen table. When company came, we said, “Hey, how y’all been?" They were served at the dining room table, but we still called it supper.

I treasure the words from my childhood. We Southerners have a proud heritage of not casting off habits and customs just because times change and other ways and words come into fashion. I’m still proud to eat supper in the evening and sit on the couch afterwards But, “hey, y’all," that’s fine with me!