Welcome to the South

I just happened to overhear a couple of my co-workers talking the other day and the phrase "bless his heart" was used and I couldn't help, but laugh. "Bless his or her heart" is so Southern. If you aren't from around here you might think the speaker is actually is blessing the person they are talking about or at least sending out great waves of positive energy, but you would be wrong. So wrong! Let me tell you about that phrase, if you need to say something ugly about somebody or discuss how stupid they are then you add "bless his/her heart" in the sentence somewhere. If you don't, you may be in danger of gossiping or come across as being mean. It doesn't matter where in the sentence you say it; personally I prefer the end of the sentence. Others prefer the beginning; I'm assuming they want to make sure they don't forget to use it. If the speaker is truly blessing somebody then they use the words "Bless him/her" without the word "heart."

Last month something else happened at work that emphasized the difference between Southerners and non-Southerners to me once again. I have to tell you a bit about myself, so just be patient I'll come back to the point directly. I'm a librarian in a media library. To give you an idea how big we are - we have in our collection 10,000+ video titles and 1,500+ audiobooks. We take up a lot of space. Anyway, I was helping a patron checkout a video when she mentioned she wanted to order a video for our collection. I told her the lady who does the ordering was in, if she wanted to do it today, so she decided to walk across the rather large room to talk to her while I was checking out her one item. The patron was back before I finished the processing her video. So I say, "Oh, she wasn't there?" The patron said "She was there." This confused me because she wasn't gone long enough to order anything, so I said "Did you change your mind about ordering your video?" Now, I got a funny look and she said "No, I ordered it." This totally floored me. She wasn't gone two minutes; if that long. I couldn't understand how she could have ordered the video that quick. Then, I realized she and the lady who does the ordering aren't from the South. That makes a huge difference. If it were two Southern ladies involved even if they were in a hurry it would take a minimum of 20 minutes. Because you have to ask about their family, what they've been up to and then it's your turn to tell all. Once that's been done, then you can talk about the video you want to order. Still you aren't done, because now you have got to talk about the video; where you heard about it, why you want it and how excited you are to have it available for checkout soon.

I noticed that I have mentioned several times the phrase "not from around here," and I haven't explained the full meaning of the term. The actual meaning of the phrase is pretty obvious: the person isn't from the South. What you probably don't know is that if someone says to you out of the blue "You aren't from around here are you?" then you have probably done something really odd. I have a friend from the North, who did something weird at my house and my mother asked me why she did it. My answer was "She isn't from around here," and that was all the explanation my mama needed. Since my friend isn't from the South, her odd behavior had a reasonable explanation. Now if you hear something like this "Well, bless your heart, you aren't from around here are you?" then you may need to start apologizing.

Other articles in the Welcome to the South series:

Part 1: Topics covered: small talk, accents and pronunciation.

Part 7: Topics covered: Meat and three, "Sir" and "Ma'am," dead relatives and Decoration Day.

Part 8: Topics covered: The controversial topics of barbeque and high school football.