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Whoops…not entirely unsuccessful.

Great Review I Liked the Description “Almost maple-sugar sweet and leafy”
Thats the kind of Tastes and Flavors that I like to “Pur Sue”
Keep on Steepin

Oooh, Typhoo. Haven’t sipped that in years. Must keep my eye out for the loose version.

gmathis, I love you! You made my day by saying “tetch”. I haven’t heard that since my mom passed away. My oldest relatives used tetched, het, yonder, riled up, and such regularly! I know exactly how much is “a mess” of collards. Sigh. The Southern language is truly a child of Shakespeare, having descended nearly unchanged from Elizabethan English.

Yep—a mess of spinach for salad, and it looks like it’s clabberin’ up to rain outside today. Just holler if you want to compare further Ozark/Southern Missouri vocabulary words… and if you haven’t read “Christy,” you need to, for the colloquialisms alone!

Souther US English bears some resemblance to Newfoundland English, which remained very much unchanged from the late 1600s to about mid-20th century. Back in university, I sounded out a phonetics-written speech from Shakespeare (Juliet, “What’s in a name?”)m the phonetics supposedly showing how Elizabethans pronounced the words. Know what I heard? A blend of Newfoundland and souther US accents.

I’m all for learning to read and write in Standard English, but the dialects are often much richer in vocab. Cuppa tay, now.

You might hear “tetch” here, too. More often pronoucned “titch.”

In the book I’m going on and on about (set in Cutter Gap, Tennessee, circa 1912), one of the discoveries of the main character is the wealth of Scots-Irish heritage that’s been buried under years of neglect, including the ballads that hearken back to Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Since I was a musician and performer from age 7, many people thought I was British when I was growing up! I spoke like the people I listened to all the time – namely Rex Harrison and Christopher Plummer – my heroes! But I can do terrific impressions of several Southern accents and lapse into one when I speak to a real Southerner. The Southern Belle is the most fun. My elder sister actually speaks that way! She used to lean toward me when my parents best friends visited and whisper, “They don’t know better, they’re Yankees.”

Someone asked me once if we pronounced “aunt” as “awnt” or “ant.” The answer was….neither! If you are saying, “This is my aunt,” you pronounced it “ant.” But if you were calling your aunt by name, it was “aint!” I had an Aint Ethel, and Aint Inez, and Aint Neal….they would have died laughing if we had said “awnt” and would have accused us of putting on airs!

Oooooh, my word. I love tangerines. And white tea. This sounds perfect.

I told my girls I bet the “trees by the river of God whose leaves are for the healing of the nations” in Revelation must be tea trees! :)

If the Greeks and Romans had access to tea, they wouldn’t have been all aggro on every body, ne?

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” Revelation 22:1-2

Which, by the way, is mostly just quoting Ezekiel 47, Zechariah 14 and Psalm 46

Amen and amen!