It Ain't a Word til Somebody Done Did Say It

I'm headed to the North Stanly High School class of 1991 reunion this weekend. In honor of my hometown, I'm posting my column from the November 23, 2001 issue of "The Pilot."

My mother told me she was befuzzled. “Do you mean befuddled? Or maybe bedazzled?” I asked helpfully, not wanting to tell the woman who taught me to speak that, hello, befuzzled isn’t a word.

“Yes,” she said. “Both.” I bit the bullet and corrected her. “But Mom, ‘befuzzled’ isn’t a word.”

“Oh, good! Then I just coined a new one!” she said, clearly pleased with herself, then added, “If Sarah Palin can do it, then so can I.”

I can’t decide if I like this new free-wheeling Patricia Stepp who is so cavalier about breaking language rules. When I was a child, she constantly interrupted me to correct my grammar. The new Patricia says things like, “Oh, honey, it don’t matter,” when I ask if she wants to eat at my native town’s Pat & Mick’s Fish Camp or Blue Bay Seafood. (The right answer is always Pat & Mick’s. Anybody can tell you that. Blue Bay is just too new, having been around a mere 25 years or so.)

Where did my mother go? When I call her on it, she waves me away and gives the lame explanation that she has “just lived in Stanly County too long.” I can’t argue with that either. I’m quite fond of my home county just 50 miles west of here, but the county seat of Albemarle will forever be colored by associations with the cute, talented but seemingly dimwitted Kellie Pickler.

I watched “American Idol” for the first and only time that year to support our hometown girl. But I shuddered when she pronounced the “L” in salmon and went on to compare her first spinach salad to “just like pickin’ leaves off a bush.” Her first spinach salad? Right. Then she pretended never to have heard of calamari! Girl, a stroll down Albemarle’s main street reveals not one, but two, restaurants with calamari on the menu.

Don’t get me wrong; I love our Southern idiosyncrasies, especially when it comes to how we talk. I’m tickled pink when my nephew Daniel says, “Do what?” as a way of expressing surprise. And I enjoy channeling all the beehived church ladies of my childhood by spurting out an occasional “I swannee.”

But to intentionally sound stupid? Come on, Kellie. You done rurnt us all (that’s “you ruined us” in countrified, as opposed to genteel, Southern speak) when you pretended Albemarle was a hillbilly town. Are there rednecks? Yes. But I do declare, even rednecks have high-functioning brains in those mulleted heads.

So where was I? Oh, yes, I’m befuzzled. I can lose track sometimes since my “rememberer,” as my uncle David calls it, is on the fritz.

Embracing language changes is difficult for this word girl, but I’m not the only one. Even my sweet husband, who usually doesn’t share my word nerd tendencies, came home the other night shaking his head. “It’s the end,” he said. “There’s no respect for the language anymore.” I waited. “I heard ‘indexes’ instead of ‘indices’ is becoming accepted,” he said with a hangdog expression on his face. “That’s ok, sweetie. It ain’t a big deal,” I said, using a word that, Lord help me, was deemed acceptable by Webster’s third edition in 1961.

That was the edition that argued almost anything goes as long as somebody uses it. I have to say I’m downright befuzzled that the learned folks at Webster’s would be so careless about what constitutes acceptable language. But since it opens the door to all kinds of made-up words, I think I’m on board. Bring on the befuzzlement.