Just a Tad Different

"Pull 'er up a tad, please, mister," said the nonchalant teen-ager pumping gas in a Union 76 service station off Interstate 75 near Vienna, Ga.

"What'd you say, son?" asked the driver with Pennsylvania plates.

"Pull 'er up a tad."

"Pull 'er what?"

"Would you please move your car closer to the pump?"

The Pennsylvania driver laughed, moved his car closer and thereby ended another skirmish in the word between the states. Along the interstates, and more often away from them, old Southern expressions like "a tad"--an indefinable little bit--survive.

For the moment at least, the South continues to cherish its language. In the South, as in no other American region, people use language as it surely was meant to be employed: a lush, personal, emphatic treasure of coins to be spent slowly and for value. Thus, in Southern idiom, no lady is merely pregnant; she is "in bloom" or "her bees are aswarming." Girls are variously "ugly as homemade soap" or "pretty as a speckled pup." It does not rain in the South; it "comes up a cloud." For young children, the mystery of the belly button is easy to explain: it is "where the Yankee shot you." Acquaintanceship? "We've howdied but we haven't shook." Crowding? "There's not room enough in here to skin a cat without getting hair in your mouth." If things are going well, "life's just a slide on a doughnut." There is also the Southern man who lies so much that he needs someone else to call his dog. Similes fall like raindrops: slow as a pond, high as a pine, sorry as gully dirt.

Much of this expressiveness, like everything else in the region, has black influences. "I'm always behead or behind," complains a black cook in Georgia over the fact that she could never get caught up in her work. In a Mississippi court, recalls TIME'S Margaret Boeth, Southern-born, a black defendant explained his relationship to the common-law wife he had murdered. She was his "much-right" woman, he said. "I figured I had as much right to her as anybody else."

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