Southern Accents

Have you seen these videos?  If not, you're either living under a rock - or out to sea on a boat.  Either way, the series has been making the rounds for a while.  And as a lifelong southerner (well, anywhere from Oklahoma to the SE Ga coast), I'd like to say they're silly stereotypes that are demeaning to women and only work to further the belief that a Southern accent is equal to a low IQ.  But I'm too busy laughing.
Both at the recognizable accents and the crazy expressions that we, as southern women, completely understand.

I've never really classified myself as "southern"  - I don't know why.  I guess I've never really thought about it.  But that is what I am.  And the more cruisers I meet that are headed south to the islands from one of those crazy Yankee states - or gad, even Canada, the more I realize we really are our own sub-culture.  I've moved about from Alabama to Oklahoma to Georgia - and the accents are all quite different.  But the mentality is pretty similar.  We're a group of people that are open and warm and would give you the coat off of our backs.  We like to feed you.   And we like to have a good time - including having enough sense to realize that life is too short to take ourselves too seriously (kinda sounds like the cruising community, right?)  Our colloquialisms make perfect sense - to us at least, and just serve to illustrate our free-spirited, fun-loving attitudes.  

Each time one of these videos come out, I watch it a few times and giggle.  These women are hilarious and manage to show just how much fun you can have when you take a look at yourself through someone else's eyes - just as we've been able to do when meeting fellow cruisers.  I love observing people and it's been very entertaining to see what other cruisers have taken away from our meet ups here in Savannah (you own GUNS?!)  I hear that the people are what makes cruising so interesting.  Even though we're still living half on land, I'm already seeing what a great community cruisers have created.

I realize I haven't been blogging much lately, but it's finals time AND time to get ready to travel during the holiday break.  (Yes, we have a house sitter - do go getting all crazy about me leaving the house empty.  Remember - I have guns!)  I hope to have time to catch up on blogging while we're out there sailing for 3 weeks.

*feel free to leave questions in the comments below if you need clarification on any of our southern expressions - or if you have a favorite that you don't see in the video!