The use of “Southern” as if there exists such singularity in people or culture is misleading, actually wrong. Across the wide expanse of area usually called “the South” is amazing variety in both people and cultures: Native Americans, African Americans from Gullah-Geechee to urbanites, Cajuns, Appalachian natives, cowboys, modern farmers, those who celebrate Irish or Scotch or Scotch-Irish or German heritage. And that just introduces the diversity of the South.

One quite pervasive practice across differences is use of hyperbole, language that intentionally exaggerates or cloaks reality, in humor or to make a moral point. Both speaker and hearer know that the words are not literally true. In fact, they often are framed as a story, not a narrative. But they communicate.

My father, a hard-working farmer who plowed with mules for too much of his life, once said that he could plow all day and then throw a rock across the area that he had cultivated. That was not true, of course, but it reflected the typical slow progress in such work. A man in that community who was suffering with a cold in the runny nose stage declared, “If my nose had been hooked up to the Ohoopee River, it would have ‘riz’ a foot today.” Anyone who has shared his malady would understand perfectly.

Hyperbole is used to express disguised protest. Some remember Tennessee Ernie Ford’s successful song “Sixteen Tons.” “I was born one morning at a quarter ‘til 9; picked up my shovel and walked to the mine; loaded 16 tons of No. 9 coal and the straw boss said, ‘Well, bless my soul.’ Saint Peter, don’t you call me 'cause I cain’t go. I owe my soul to the company store.”

This is a protest against cradle-to-grave debt peonage, a financial device that tied people to work, even a particular employer. It was ubiquitous across the South and elsewhere, typical in mining, textile manufacturing, turpentining and share-cropping. Debt for food and other essentials from company stores (aka commissaries) or cash advances frequently was greater than workers were paid. Workers could not