I’m from eastern Kentucky, and I’m in college in Boston.
First off—Southerners don’t often talk about Northerners. We talk about Yankees.
Iced Lipton ain’t tea. It’s Luzianne all the way down here.
“Bless their heart” is indeed a way of softening a rude thing when you’re talking about someone, but if someone says “bless your heart” to you, oh, honey. Honey.
That’s a thing—I find myself referring to people of any gender and age as “honey”.
Northerners think white gravy is weird (if they’ve heard of it at all). It’s hard as all get-out to find decent dried pinto beans up here. And y’all Northerners don’t cook with lard. It’s everywhere in the South. Lard and bacon grease. Strangely enough, it’s real hard to find a decent Mexican place in Boston.
Jelly on sausage is totally a thing in my area. It’s almost always grape jelly on sausage, too.
I always try to smile at or chat with campus security, which almost no one else did. I also surprised pretty much every cafeteria/”café” worker on campus by thanking them and wishing them a good day whenever I ordered and received my order.
I cannot for the life of me pronounce “pin” and “pen” differently. It’s all i’s. I know people who say “yallow” instead of yellow, but that’s more rare than the e/i thing.
I’ve also had to learn to ask for things. When you’re at someone’s house, you don’t ask for food or drink. You wait for them to offer it to you. My friends discovered this the first time I meekly requested “some water or something”—after all, I was a guest in their room and I didn’t want to inconvenience them.
My hometown is incredibly Protestant—Southern Baptist, mostly. We have one tiny Catholic church, and according to my parents, there was once a (as in one) Jewish family that lived somewhere in the county, but they moved away a long while ago.
Funerals are huge deals. There’s visitation for two or three days, which include full services, and the funeral itself is like going to Sunday-morning church. Everybody who knows anybody in the family attends. There’s great food, too. Some people still have funerals in the home, though I’ve never been to one. In my 19 years, I have literally lost count of the funerals I’ve been to, and I know some people up here who have only been to close relatives’ funerals.
... now I want to go home, dangit.
