Colloquialisms can be found wherever self-contained communities exist. They don’t have to be rural, and they’re not confined to past generations. 

Urban communities have their own sayings, and new language — words, contractions and combinations — occurs all the time. Many, like those used so adroitly today by texters, comprise a language completely foreign to the digitally challenged among us. But that’s a topic for another day.

My knowledge of local sayings and dialect is largely limited to this corner of Virginia and a time that has now mostly slipped away. Words and phrases used locally were influenced by Old English usage and could be found as well in rural communities far to the north and south of here.

This column, for example, is named for one of my favorite local sayings, one that I’m intimately familiar with. Fields in Tidewater Virginia were rarely square or rectangular. They followed land contours, cut here and there by ravines or swampy areas. 

A field would thus have a large section with long rows, and smaller areas that contained short rows. When field work was undertaken, it was traditional and convenient to work the long rows first and finish up in the short ones. “In the short rows” became synonymous with quick or easier work, and the expression spilled over to all manner of tasks that have absolutely nothing to do with field work. This column seemed to fit the phrase.

Field work has always been the underpinning of farm life and was responsible for many other rural expressions. That work has been revolutionized during the past century, thanks to first steam and then gas-powered and diesel engines and the thousands upon thousands of innovations that have changed farming since those first behemoths began replacing horses and mules.

And the expressions that I heard while growing up on a small farm had been used by farm families for generations, some probably for millennia. A few have survived until now, though few people know the origins that underlie them.

Mules were often favored over horses because they were, pound for pound, stronger and had more endurance than horses.

Either animal was called upon to pull a variety of implements across a field, from plows to cultivators and other soil and crop conditioners. To do so, they were harnessed to the equipment with “traces” (small chains) that led down either side of the animal from hames located around the animal’s neck back to the implement being pulled.

If a horse or mule managed to step outside of a trace chain, it couldn’t pull the plow and was likely to go a bit crazy. The only solution was to re-harness the animal to the equipment without getting kicked or stepped on.

Thus, “stepping out of the traces” was a well-understood broach of order in rural areas, and it came to describe young men and girls who wouldn’t obey their family or community standards

Far better was the compliant youngster who “stayed inside the traces.”

As important to successful work as staying “inside the traces” was the idea of simply going to work, and that was often described as “putting your foot in the balk,” which was the space between crop rows and the place where much work began. To do a job, you have to begin somewhere, and “putting your foot in the balk” describes that start. The saying was comparable to Woody Allen’s admonition that showing up is 80% of success.

A mule or a horse both understood that at the end of a long day, food and water awaited their return to the barn, and most any horse or mule would become more active when “headed for the barn.” That saying also came to include people headed for the comfort and warmth of their home — and still does.

Mules are not inherently “stubborn,” according to some literature I came across, but you’d never convince an early 20th century farmer of that. The idea of “stubborn as a mule” became so firmly entrenched that it remains an almost universal part of our lexicon today, though few of us have ever been around a mule.

The love-hate relation between farmers and their mules was also the origin of “kick like a mule,” and the more colorful expression, that a mule — or cow — could “kick the soda out of a biscuit without cracking the crust.”

That relationship also led to the idea that before you could get a mule to do what you wanted you might have to “get his attention with a 2×4 between his ears.” Not a recommended approach to animal husbandry and training today.

Stubbornness was apparently a frequent problem in rural life because there were so many ways to describe it. People were often described as hardheaded as a locust post or a light’ud (lightwood) knot. When two stubborn people got together to discuss their differences, they could often be described as “black gum against thunder.”

 

John Edwards is publisher emeritus of The Smithfield Times. His email address is j.branchedwards@gmail.com.