BEING TEXAN: LIKE A NATIVE

 

So I'm not a native Texan, though I wish I was. It would be somewhat easier to explain the state's profound influence on me as a person if I could say "born and bred."

I was born in St. Louis, but there is hardly anything about that state has shaped me. Apart from the purely bureaucratic. (There is a St. Louis county, but St. Louis ain't in it!)

Nor Mississippi, which is where we moved to shortly after I was born. No, it's TEXAS as a southern state that has most shaped me through my childhood there. We lived there from 1969 to 1977, and we lived in two distinct regions of it: north-central (Sweetwater near Abilene) in the Big Sky / Dustbowl part of the state AND in the south-central region (Seguin near both Austin and San Antonio) in the River Valley / Hill Country part of it.

Or in another way of thinking: from the Scotch-Irish-Appalachian part of it, to the German heart of the state. Some clues that you have met a Texan:

They ask you "What part?" when you say you lived there or visited there.

Corollary: "I'm from _____ near _____." Texas is THAT Big. And the second place can easily be forty minutes to an hour-and-a-half away. (Padre Island was nearly three hours away from Seguin, and we used to regularly go both ways in a day to "go to the beach.")

They use the expression "couple of" to mean two or more AND "few" to mean three or more. (That is, in my experience.)

 They use the expression "all hat, no cattle" to mean "all talk, no action." And then smile when you learn that and think it's ALL it means!

They order Sweet Tea, and then they add more sweetener to it after it arrives.

The pen/pin merger. They can't seem to distinguish between minimal pairs having em/im or en/in in them. (It's diagnostic of the many Texan accents that exist there.)

When they go to the local HEB (supermarket chain), they park in the shade, rather than closer to the entry. Though actually, that's just part of being Southern.

There's much more to it than that, of course. Just what I can think of right-off-the-top-of-my head. Much more to come later, I'm sure!