Thus may Foghorn Leghorn, that genteel chicken of the southern coastal plain, have started this blog post. While many mistake the "drawl" as the standard speech pattern of the American South, some unwary travelers have been confronted and confounded by that hillbilly brogue known as the "Appalachian Mumble." In fact, the first time my wife visited my hometown, I found myself serving as an impromptu translator. To the untrained ear, the mishmash of jumbled words, deliberate mispronunciations and gratuitous use of extra "r's" renders the English language into a gelatinous stew that pours like this:
Not long after we met, a friend of mine from Massachusetts informed me that when I spoke, all he heard was "Deeder, Deeder, Deeder." It took me a couple of years to realize he was not kidding, and that this was not simply a manifestation of the Bay Stater tendency to loathe the letter "r."
But I digress.
The true purpose of this post is to acknowledge my recent blog silence. In my defense, I've deliberately chosen to devote all of my limited writing time to the WIP this month. However the cardinal sin of blogging is neglect, and any way ya' peel 'at tater, I deserve to be boiled and mashed for not posting in so long.
So for that I truly apologize, and I promise to make the appropriate recompense. Please feel free to suggest an act of penance in the comment section. Maybe I'll do an entire post about writing dialects and accents, since that is one of my guilty writing pleasures.
Crambone!
