I love that old Frank Profitt song too, Tipper. Paul & Pap did a very fine job or as my Mother would say “an extree fine job”.
—Jeanette Q
extra
A variant forms extery, extrey, extry.
1813 Hartsell Memora 98 I and my suboltens never drew aney extey rations from the day we started up to this time. 1861 Martin CE Letters (Oct 6) every six months we get 21 dollars extry to by clothing withe. 1863 Brown CW Letters (Nov 4) [I] bin in the sruves twelv month and i hant bin put on extery duty yet. 1923 Greer-Petrie Angeline Doin’ Society 21 He could spar’ him one of his knives and forks, fur someone had drapt sev’ral extry ones at his plate. 1940 Simms Wiley Oakley 16 I’ll not charge anything extry for guidin’ the valet. 1973 GSMNP-79:21 I thought the people down here just tried to work too hard and to make that extry money. 1979 Big South Fork OHP-4 They would take them maybe somewhere else and get a extry price for them thataway. 1989 Matewan OHP-7 He was a-trying to make a extry run [of whiskey]. 1998 Dante OHP-12 [In] this home, they had a big extry room, and that’s where that I went to school.
B adjective Very good, excellent.
1939 Hall Coll (Cosby Creek TN) He was a extry hand to work. [DARE extra adj B chiefly South, South Midland]
C adverb Very.
1989 Matewan OHP-102 They was extry large rooms.
—Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English
Like Jeanette’s mother, Pap said extree too.
He used it like A, B, and C in the dictionary. I’m betting Jeanette’s mother did too. She was slightly older than Pap but they were both born and raised in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
Besides their common language, they also shared a great affinity for the music of the mountains and their family that surrounded them.
Last night’s video: Garden Tour.
Tipper
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I spell it okry, you spell it okree. Same word same pronunciation.
I spell it extry, you spell it extree. Same word same pronunciation.
We both are trying to spell the pronunciation we learnt when we first learned to speak.
Why do some folks here have a problem with that? Were we deliberately misled by our parents? Did out parents teach us to talk “wrong” so that we could become a laughingstock? To pay us to fight for strangers’ enjoyment? Or dance for them? Or just to hear us talk?
Just because they watched Beverly Hillbillies and went to Dollywood a time or two doesn’t make them an expert on Appalachian culture. In truth the opposite is the case.
It isn’t our ignorance that’s showing but their lack of character. They want to live amongst us but want us to change to meet their needs. We need to prepare to defend ourselves.
I wish I could have free reign to show these aloof ideologues their place but sadly their perception of reality cannot be changed especially by a lowlife such as me. They will always find a way to elevate their position if only in their minds.
I don’t hear extree much except maybe from a few older folks now and then. I do believe, however, that your gardens looked “extree” good last evening. I enjoyed seeing everything from the corn to the flowers. We have been getting so many tomatoes—it’s wonderful. I am planning to put some up tomorrow morning. I still have lots of videos to catch up on from being busy with my sweet grandchildren visiting all week. We had such a good time and now my house is too quiet. I am about to go do some porch sitting with hubby. We heard thunder and believe we are gonna see some rain soon. Have a wonderful rest of your day everyone!
Always growing up many of the older folks I knew replaced a with y. My beloved Grandma Ida was always called Idy by Grandpa. My dad continued use of many words he had grown up with. With the advent of TV it may have robbed us of many of our unique pronunciations. I still recall long ago when I accidentally said, “I heered’’ something or other around my friends. We all roared with laughter, because there was a tendency with TV and teachers to steer us away from our mountain talk. I remember a charming Mrs. Toothman making a supreme effort to have us pronounce our ing’s on the end of words. All this wasted time and poor understanding of cultures and heritage in an effort to mold us into what we are not. I always tried to understand the deeper meaning of everything, and I am so grateful to people such as Tipper Pressley for helping and guiding us to be proud of our roots. Being real is not common anymore, but it should be a goal. Thank God, I remember in the 1940’s and 1950’s when everybody around me was the real deal.
I wonder, Tipper, if your spelling doesn’t confuse. In my experience, the word is pronounced ‘extry’ not ‘extree’. I say this because I’ve never heard – in more than 80 years – emphasis placed on the ‘ee’. I’ve often heard ‘no siree’ (even ‘no siree, bobtail) but never extree, with equal emphasis on both syllables or even with the last syllable stressed.
Am I wrong? While I’ve spent quite some time visiting in Appalachia and have roots there, I never heard exTREE but often heard EXtry.
You asked! I answered. YOU’RE WRONG! You are putting emphasis on the a non existent syllable. FYI Raleigh is farther from your roots than Texas.
In my mother’s Kentuckian family, any word or name ending in letter a was spoken as y. I thought it was just a family thing until I heard Loretta Lynn .
My grandmother was from Appalachia, where her family had lived for many generations. She didn’t have much of an accent or dialect, perhaps because her family went west when she was a teenager. When I was working on the genealogy I noticed that in the censuses names that ended in an ‘a’ were usually written down as ending in a ‘y.’ I find regional accents and dialects charming and hope they never get homogenized. So glad I found your blog through a link on the blog Comptonia.
Oh my! My grandparents said extree all the time, as well as winder and feller. I still use them sometimes! Also, congrats on the corn!! What a happy surprise!!!
Cap’n D’s Seafood ran a commercial for a short time that showed an older couple entering a restaurant and discussing what to order. The presumably southern woman said, “I’m not paying extry for that.” Those words must have offended someone from a sensitive group of TV viewers as the commercial was short-lived. My parents used Y instead of A in many words, especially names.
I’m thinking that this (extra) is a word that we Appalachianers are very likely to trade in the modern way of saying for the old-time way just to put emphasis on it when everyday “extra” is just not good enough. And, from time to time, we choose words and the way to say them to hearken back to fond memories of place, time and people now gone. That quirk is just one of the ways we get mis-understood sometimes.
The garden is looking extree green and lush after the rain.
I say extry and okry and lots of similar ending words all the time. Not because I don’t know the other pronunciation but because they are the words I learned as my speech developed. Everything else has been like learning a foreign language.
It’s not an oddity folks, it’s not a quirk, it’s not an eccentricity. It’s an entirely different language that is being driven out by governmental agencies, “well meaning” outsiders, and not so well meaning insiders who’s intentions are to make a buck off it.
Hi Tipper! Just popping in to wish you a fruitful book signing tomorrow. I hope you meet some fine people
What dear dear people who have made a difference by making the world a better place and then gone on to their rightful home in paradise to rest! Though they are gone, they are missed, spoken of in the highest regard, and thought of often! What fine legacy could be more??? My cup runneth over with good things!!! Here’s to you Pap and Miss Cindy!!!
Up north, we say “exter,” as in an, “He did an exter fine job. I guess the differences in dialects mostly depend on ancestry, yours being largely Scotch-Irish and northern Michigan being German, Polish, and Finnish. My people hail predominantly from Ireland, but the dialects here are slightly different from Appalachia, but very similar.
From the genealogical research I have done the Irish is suspiciously missing from the Scotch-Irish in my (and Tippers) background in Southwestern North Carolina. Historical records and DNA results suggest our ancestors predate, by more than 100 years, the influx of mixed Scots and Irish in the mid 1800s. I show not one drop of Irish blood in my DNA. Both my maternal and paternal cousins show similar results. I grew up thinking that I descended from Scots-Irish peoples but only Scottish DNA is there. Did my people come here directly from Scotland? Did they live in Ireland for a while without intermingling with the inhabitants of the Emerald Isle?
Of course there were also folks from England, Wales, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and a tiny bit of Northwestern Europe but the glaring absence of the Irish is intriguing to me.
One thing I do know, we have a particularly different language. Not just a different way of pronouncing words but also in sentence structure.
I’s extree tarred tuh day.
It that a quote from Uncle Remus?
The term Scotch-Irish comes from the fact that many Scots move to Northern Ireland after the Battle of Culloden. There was little co-mingling with the Irish there. Many of those Scots then migrated to the colonies, principally to North Carolina, where they were called Scotch-Irish to identify them from the Scots coming from Scotland who stayed behind for English rule. To be Scotch-Irish was accepted almost as an honorific used to separate the 2 groups of Scots.
My mother’s lineage is Scotch-Irish. My father’s is almost 100% English, although the surname “Hutchins” is known to have been extant in Scotland. One of my great grandmothers was Irish and is buried in the Tabor Cemetery in Brushy Creek in Swain County.
Just Brush Creek, Robert, no Y. There are a row of Tabor infants buried at Grave Gap Cemetery. That’s all the markers say “Tabor Infant”. Grave Gap is just up river from Brush Creek but on the western side. Find-A-Grave does have them listed but I have seen them for myself. My wife is buried there and my name and birth date are on her stone. She is in good company there!
Good morning Tipper and Good morning to all your wonderful readers! I hope everyone has an extree fine day today!
Extree, that is with a long sounding e!
As you can see by the time, I have had a sleepless night. I will often say extree instead of extra. I think Pap and Paul do extree good on a lot of their songs, I especially like the old time Gospel Hymns.
Yesterday, Tipper wrote about the signs and the best time to plant, I grew up hearing the older folks say if you want to have turnips you need to plant your turnip greens byAugust 15th. I don’t know what the ones did that planted by the signs if the sign was not right for the 15th.