Talk Like a Texan

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Dogs are a big thing in Texas, especially in the country, where everybody tends to have at least one dog as a watchdog. And often there are two or three, because some are hunting dogs.

The first dog I ever had was a solid brown medium-size mutt with a black stripe down his back. I named him Tippy.

The name came from the first puppy I picked from his litter, a light brown and white spotted puppy with a white tip on his tail. The first Tippy got run over by a car before he was old enough to leave his mother, so Daddy picked another pup, but we still called him Tippy.

Tippy must have had a wide variety of ancestors. His mother appeared to be all or mostly leopard, a breed of hunting dog with gray fur and pale blue eyes. Sort of rare. 

None of the puppies looked like her, though, and none of them looked like any other particular breed. Daddy used to say that Tippy was “leopard and Heinz” (after the food brand Heinz, which used to claim to have “57 varieties”).

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Blowin’ and goin’ is an old-fashioned East Texas expression. I wasn’t sure people still used that fine old Texas phrase till Sunday, when two middle-aged couples sitting behind me at the ballet were talking about their various pleasure trips:

“Speaking of shopping, on our trips to Europe we’re always just blowin’ and goin’. We never have time for buying trinkets to bring home,” said a man.

“Well, we were blowin’ and goin’ on this trip, for sure,” said the woman from the other couple.

In Texas English, blowin’ and goin’ means dashing around, all busy busy busy, almost without stopping to take a breath. 

Strange as it seems, to say that someone has been just blowin’ and goin’ is generally considered a compliment. The implication is that they have been working hard and getting a lot done—even if what they achieved, as in this case, was apparently just having a really good time.

Some of us Texans like to sleep late. Sometimes it just seems to be a necessity, depending on what you’ve been up to the night before.

But we don’t always get to. So sometimes, if you hang around and listen, you might hear a statement something like this:

“Hell, yes, I enjoyed the party! We stayed almost till dawn. But then Travis dragged me out of bed at the crack of noon to go look at a deer lease. I thought I was gonna die and hoped it’d be soon.”

Clearly that was a really good party. And obviously the speaker had just a little bit too much fun. Hence the apparent hangover.

Maybe Travis was the designated driver the night before, but I doubt it. I imagine that Travis is one of those relentlessly cheerful morning people (the kind who never seem to be phased by any activity the night before).

Or else he is a really practiced partier (if you know what I mean) and also one of those dedicated hunters who never let anything interfere with getting their deer. 

Well, more power to him, but some of us need our sleep.

Houstonians act like they are made of sugar.

In case you haven’t noticed by now, Texans do tend to talk in metaphors. We love our colorful expressions.

When I was a little girl, if my grandmother and I were caught out somewhere without an umbrella, and I hesitated to run through the rain to get to the car, for example, she would say, “You’re not made out of sugar. You won’t melt.”

Or more often, just “Come on, you’re not made of sugar.” 

Years ago, I can remember going to a (well-attended) ballet class in the evening on the day that a hurricane had passed through town. We didn’t let the weather slow us down much in those days.

Nowadays, maybe because of three major hurricanes and a couple of other floods in the last ten years, attendance drops way off at evening events if it rains just a little bit. So now you see why I say Houstonians act like they are made of sugar.

You probably never heard of the fig orchards of Galveston County. That’s because the Great Fig Bubble burst 100 years ago.

You see, people from up North, in places like New York, were persuaded to buy land down on the Gulf Coast of Texas back in the late 1800s to plant fig orchards and make their fortunes. (I guess figs were in big demand back then.) Figs do grow very well here.

Fashion changed, I guess. Apparently those Yankees lost interest in figs. Eventually much of that land was abandoned without even planting any fig trees.

Naturally the land got scarfed up by the locals. In Texas if you fence a piece of land and use it for 10 years, and nobody protests, you can claim it.

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I once took a business trip to Andrews, Texas. Never heard of it? Me neither, at the time.

Andrews is west of Midland and Odessa, near the New Mexico border, not too far from Carlesbad. That’s West Texas, not quite desert, but close enough. It is in the southern part of the Great Plains. It’s flat, it’s hot, and you can see for miles.

I was out in the oilfield, watching a workover crew replace an electrical subsurface pump in an oil well. But at the back of my mind, something kept nagging.

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Texans spend a lot of time outside. We love swimming, hunting, fishing, boating, and camping. And, of course, that great Southern sport, suntanning. (Plus a lot of us still go to work outdoors.)

Many of those activities can be very hard on a wristwatch, so we often don’t wear one. Yet there are some folks who just generally can’t relax. They are always worried about what time it is.

So if you ask a watchless, relaxing Texan for the time, you are liable to see an elaborate and ironic pantomime, in which the person you asked for the time ostentatiously lifts his left arm, stares intently at his bare wrist for a moment, and then drawls, “I’d say it’s about a freckle past a hair.”

And that’s your cue not to ask such a dumb question again, if you know what’s good for you.

Texans don’t like to be bossed around. (Truth is, we all really want to be the boss.)

Texans generally put up with their employers (and the police), but anybody else had better go easy. They’d better not micromanage. They’d better not nag. And they had better not be too officious.

If they try it, they are likely to hear this fine old Texas expression: “Who died and left you in charge?”

Occasionally that is said in a humorous way, but there is always a little bit of seriousness in it. As my Irish grandmother used to say, “Many a truth is told in jest.” Well, that’s also true in Texas.

Once upon a time there were two good old Gulf Coast girls. One was from Bay City; the other was from Texas City. They were roommates and sorority sisters in college.

A few years later one married a man from Oklahoma. The other married a Houstonian. The husbands liked each other, too, and life was good.

Then a hurricane was predicted. It was aimed right at Houston.

No problem. The Gulf Coast girls came from families that had weathered generations of hurricanes, going back a hundred years. They knew exactly what to do.

The night before the hurricane, after filling ice chests with ice, filling every possible container with water, from soup pots to bathtubs, and gathering hurricane supplies such as candles, flashlights and batteries, tape and builder’s plastic, and lots and lots of Doritos and bean dip, the Gulf Coast girls were cooking.

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Sometimes you just have to make a bold statement to make someone get your point. Of course, if you’re a Texan, you just like to be colorful and emphatic anyway.

“You don’t have a dog in this fight” is a way of telling someone to back off, because the situation is not their concern. It’s also a way of warning someone that they shouldn’t interfere in someone else’s business, lest they get hurt.

So instead of saying, “Butt out” as our Yankee cousins might, we say that dog-fight thing, which is kind of more polite, don’t you think?