If someone’s gone pecan, they’re doomed, defeated, and down on their luck. This idiom, common in New Orleans, probably caught on because of its rhyme. This is part of a complete episode.
Leave a comment
1 comment
More from this show
The splendid new Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English (Bookshop|Amazon), edited by Michael Montgomery and Jennifer Heinmiller, is a greatly expanded version of the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (Amazon), edited by Montgomery and Joseph...
Barbara in Norfolk, Virginia, wonders about the drawl of Southern American English. A great resource on how people perceive others’ dialects is the work of linguist Dennis Preston and his book Perceptual Dialectology. This is part of a...
Recently on a trip to Georgia a tour guide told us about pecan trees and their survivability during storms. The pecan trees did not fair well when compared with pines and their beloved live oaks. So as a result of two catastrophic hurricanes in that region the pecan production essentially went belly up. So i’m wondering if this is a possibility for the phrase “gone pecan".