DiBenedetto David - S is for Southern: A Guide to the South, from Absinthe to Zydeco

FOR THE RECORD, ABSINTHE WILL NOT MAKE you hallucinate forest elves or slice off your ear. More than a century after the European spirits bohemian mystique begot a national panic in the United States, it isnt even illegal anymore. A New Orleans environmental chemist named Ted Breaux brought an end to its stateside ban with a series of studies in the early 2000s. His conclusion: the Green Fairy doesnt contain nearly enough toxic thujonea by-product of one of its key ingredients, wormwoodto trigger hallucinations, and is therefore no more hazardous or morally degenerative than any other high-proof spirit. Sort of disappointing, no? But now, you can drink the herbal spirit as your ancestors did, free of gothic overtones. In the Crescent City, folks have long been fond of the slushy absinthe frappso fond that in 1934 they invented anise-flavored Herbsaint to replace the then banned base spirit. The flip side of the standard baroque spoon-and-sugar-cube method of absinthe drinking, the frapp, a blend of absinthe, soda water, and mint over crushed ice, is wonderfully refreshing on a clear summer day.

ACADIANS CAME TO BE KNOWN AS CAJUNS after they moved to Louisiana and lost a syllable or two. See .

T HE SOUTHERN ACCENT IS ONE OF OUR nations greatest treasures. Its beauty rivals that of a songbird or the most resonant cello. Had the Southern accent not been invented, our ears would have fallen off long ago, or become vestigial, fleshy cauliflowers hanging off the sides of our heads, for without the Southern accent there would have been nothing much worth listening to. Someone, somewhere, can make a case that Im exaggerating its importance to us as a people and to America, but I can assure you I am not.

Maybe I am. But its lovely, isnt it, the Southern accent? Its not because I have one myself that I say this, because my accent is not what it could be: years of watching I Dream of Jeannie growing up have me talking more like an out-of-work B actor than like my grandmother Eva Pedigo, who came from Savannah, settled in Birmingham, and sounded as if she marinated her vowels in butter overnight.

An accent is your vocal personality. Its like a hairstyle or a favorite pair of shoes, the only difference being that its in your throat. Theres a Northern accent as well, and its easily distinguishable from a Southern accent the same way a paper bag full of broken glass is distinguishable from a cashmere scarf. But when you leave the South and head in other directions, accents tend to disappear, the song of language is lost, and what youre left with is bland communication, meaning without music.

Its amusing, at least to me, to hear scholarly argot used to understand and investigate our day-to-day lives, especially the most resolutely nonscholarly subjects, like Southern English. My wife, a Vermonter, had no idea what fixin to meant when she first heard it. Had she researched the phrase, she would have learned that it indicated immediate future action. I could have told her that. A Southern drawl is vowel breaking; thats what you call it if youre in the language business. Vowels are broken into gliding vowels, making a one-syllable word like cat sound as if it might have two syllables (something like ca-yat). People not from the South say that sounds stupid, but I say Im rubber and youre glue, and anything you say bounces off me and sticks to you.

A Southern accent is not a single accent. There are many different Southern accents, some so distinct that an Alabama native like me will have no idea what that Carolinian might mean with the sounds coming out of his mouth. The Southern accent baseline is the merging of certain wordspen and pin, cot and caught. Why we talk the way we do is due to an ironic mlange of the speech of British immigrants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the Creole speech of African slaves. Today, believe it or not, Southern is the single most spoken accent in America. The rapidly growing number of Southern-accent speakers is due either to the fact that were having a lot more children down here than they are anywhere else, or the fact that were getting converts from Boston and New Jersey, seeking a better life. Probably both.