Jeff from Memphis, Tennessee, grew up in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky, where his coal-miner father raised green beans. When those beans couldn’t always be canned or frozen, the family threaded the full pods onto string, hung them in the...
Barbara Kingsolver’s book Demon Copperhead is a retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield set in today’s Appalachia. Martha shares memories of a long-ago visit to Kingsolver’s family farm in Virginia, where they...
“Cornbread,” a poem by Kentucky writer Silas House, is thick with sensory memories of Appalachian cooking and family: scooping cornmeal by hand and “the splash of egg, the gallop of buttermilk.” The poet recalls his mother cooking after work, the...
To shammick means to “amble about slowly or lounge around.” Most often heard in Appalachia, this verb is also spelled shummick. Writer Horace Kephart defined it this way: “to shuffle about, idly nosing into things, as a bear does when there is...
In parts of Appalachia, the expression give someone down the road means “to reprimand” someone or “tell someone to get lost.” In Ireland, to give someone down the banks has a somewhat similar meaning, apparently referring to...
Rose in Edmonton, Kentucky, notes that many people in her area pronounce the word idea as if it were ideal. That’s a common dialectal feature in the Southern United States, as well as Appalachia and the Mid-Atlantic. In parts of New England...
