You love them. We’ve restocked them.
If you’ve come to see us at the North Carolina State Fair, you may have taken home a dialect button or two, featuring colloquialisms from all over North Carolina and the United States.
You’ll still be able to find some of our most popular buttons at the fair, like:
“Dingbatter”, “Si’gogglin,” and “I Speak North Cackalacky”
In addition to our old favorites we’ve added a couple of new, popular expressions to our collection, and we’ve revamped our most requested button. Here are the newbies:
Bussin’
According to the forthcoming Oxford English Dictionary of African American English, this means, “impressive or tasty.
You might say, “Those wings James brought to the cookout were bussin’!”
Slay
You’ve probably used “slay” in typically brutal contexts, but have you ever used it to reference someone’s outfit or hair? According to the Cambridge Dictionary, “slay” means “to impress someone very much or to be very good or impressive.”
You might say, “Girl, you’re slaying that outfit! I couldn’t dress better if I wanted to.”
And our newly redesigned,
Bless Your Heart
An oldie but a goodie, and by far our most sought after button.
Do we even need a definition? Our Southerners know it well, but in case you’re reading from elsewhere in the world, the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as an expression of “fondness or sympathy for someone.” In some contexts, this expression is accompanied by a twinge of condescension.
The NC State Fair will be here before you know it, and our new and old buttons will be waiting there for you. Can you recommend a word or phrase for our next dialect button drop? Let us know what you think!
1) “I swan-nee.” (My mother’s polite way of saying “I swear”)
2) “Can you carry me to town?” (Would you drive me in your car to town?)
3) Now you have “Flung a craving on me”. (You have induced me to crave a certain food)
4) “I will slap you into next week”. (You have made me mad or are about to make me mad.)
5) “You don’t have sense God-give-a -billy -goat”. (You are stupid.)
6) Well “hells bells”! An exclaimation.
7) Fudge! (An polite way of saying “Fu** that you now hear everywhere.)
From the holler
“Right now…in a minute.”
As a Johnston County native, I never thought about this phrase. I knew it to mean, I’ll get to it soon. Just not this minute.
But when I said it to my five-year-old son who grew up in Pittsburgh, he said, “Which is it, Mommy? Right now or after while?”
His valid question gave me pause.