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Here is “Round Twelve” of your insights into how to know if someone is from North Carolina. You may also want to check out Round One (February 2004), Round Two (March 2004), Round Three (May 2004), Round Four (July 2004), Round Five (August 2004), Round Six (September 2004), Round Seven (November 2004), Round Eight (January 2005), Round Nine (February 2005), Round Ten (March 2005) and Round Eleven (April 2005).

If you can think of anything to add to this list, send it to us:

E-mail: Carolina.country@ncemcs.com
Mail: P.O. Box 27306, Raleigh, NC 27611.
Phone: (919) 875-3062.

From Lauren Lemons, Westfield

• Your friends drive 4-wheelers and tractors to school and hang their parking stickers on them.
• You put a pipe on your 4-wheeler to make it louder, and you won’t ride one unless it is loud.
• Your dad tells the lady who works at Wal-Mart that you are his son when you are his daughter.
• You think Wal-Mart is the best place, and you go more than three times a week.
• You use the bathroom outside because you can.
• You take a bath in pickle juice for a sunburn.
• You know what a Come to Jesus meeting is.

From Tammy Newsome, Kenly

• Your Grandma tells you she “hoped” somebody do something instead of helped.
• You begged your mama for clogging lessons instead of ballet.
• You’ll be glad when summer gets here so you can go to the lawnmower pull on Friday nights.

From Carla Sutton, Newton Grove 

• You take your 2-year-old daughter to a grill that serves brown hot dogs (not Carolina Bright Leaf), and she looks at her plate and says, “I don’t see my hot dog!”

From Sonja and Donnie, Linden

• Your Papa was one of the local bootleggers.
• You learned to drive behind the wheel of your Papa’s pickup in the cow pasture.
• Your pet goat rode up front in the pickup.
• You had a steer that would cry when you took away his feed bucket.
• You got a calf from the dairy to raise with a Nanny goat that had lost her babies.
• You bottle-fed that calf from an old Pepsi bottle when he got too big to drink straight from the goat.
• You helped kill hogs, make fresh sausage and cure hams in the pack house.
• You had to feed up every morning before school.
• You had a dog that would pull corn and stack it in a pile for the pony.
• As a girl you got your first pocket knife from your Papa.

From Nickey Hudson, Morganton

• You get something out of the Kelvinator.
• You eat pickled eggs and baby’s teeth on chicken bones or fried chicken’s feet.
• You go blackberry picking barefooted.
• You can make music with a comb, a jug or spoons.

From Angie Thompson, Cedar Grove

• You had to choose between square nabs and round nabs when you took a break from pulling tobacco.
• You fried tobacco worms in the exhaust of the tractor.
• You got excited when you graduated from driving the tractor in the tobacco field to working at the barn.
• You got a tan on the top of your thighs, but no where else because you hadn’t graduated yet to the barn.
• You didn’t get new school clothes until after the first tobacco sold.
• You use a hose pipe to water your garden.
• “E’nin” is the time after dinner and before supper and can extend to bedtime.
• The pond was the hangout for your high school friends.

From Kim Wilson, Haywood EMC

• You know what git-r-done means, and who said it first.
• You know what Granny means when she says you’ll “marr up” in the mud if you go outside after it’s rained.
• When you tell a joke and no one laughs, you say, “I don’t care who you are, that right there’s funny.”
• “Peeps” are the little marshmallow candies you get at Easter.
• When your cousin gets a new truck, you go to his house, sit in it, and listen to music.

From Akilia Slocumb, Raeford

• Your grandma thinks turning on the TV too fast will run up her light bill.
• Everything your parents need you to get is “that thing right der,” or “that thing ova der.”

From Stuart Good, Kernersville

• You watched Andy Griffith reruns three times a day in the days before cable.
• You believe it’s obvious that the Revolutionary War was won at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.
• Wherever you go doesn’t stack up to home.

From Marilyn Best, Bessemer City

• Ladies panties are called drawers or step-ins.
• The knife your daddy carried to church was his Sunday knife, and it was a smaller version of his weekday knife.
• Girls were admonished not to “show your hog,” referring to climbing trees and showing their underwear that was made from flour sacks which often had pictures of hogs on them.

From Charlotte Ingle

• You put a piece of sewing thread on a June bug’s leg, hold it up above your head and watch it circle around and around.
• Your mom rolled your hair with strips of brown grocery bags or rag scraps.
• You made a kite out of newspapers and skinny pieces of kindling, then made the tail from flour sack strips.
• To make a snowman you wore an old pair of socks with holes in them because you didn’t have gloves.

From Melissa C. Hiatt, Mount Airy

• You know what “aggrafretted” means.
• You knew at least one woman in your neighborhood who wore a bonnet at all times.
• You call cicadas “locusts” and have pulled their body shells off of the side of tree trunks.
• Most everybody you knew worked for Reynolds (R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.).
• Those who didn’t work for Reynolds worked for Hanes.
• You pressed your hand in plaster for a project in Vacation Bible School.
• You have been told to hook the door instead of lock it.
• You have had your picture taken while sitting on the fake horses at Tweetsie Railroad.

From Geranium Rivera, Salemburg

• You moved the stob over so the clothesline would be tighter.
• You took the wet hippen off the baby and put a suger-tit in her mouth.
• At a corn shucking you sipped sillybulb.
• During the summer you slept on a pallet on the front porch.
• The linoleum was cold to your feet as you put the dishes in the sink.

From Susan and Shell Davis, Goldsboro

• You know that field peas are not “filled” with anything.
• You holler for the youngins.
• “Me and you is gonna dance” means a bad whuppin is coming.
• You eat peanut butter and banana sandwiches with mayo and sugar.
• Your youngins call for the dog to clean up spilt popcorn on the rug.

From Andrew Lamm, Red Springs

• You know most or all the words to “Dixie.”
• You wear your John Deere hat everywhere you go.

From Vicki Cruthis, Trinity

• You have ever been to a rat killing.

Angela Lawson, Greensboro

• Your grandpa or favorite uncle called you by silly, affectionate nicknames like “Sassafras,” “Fish Lips,” “Frog Legs” and “Stink Weed.”
• You know that North Carolina has two state flowers: the dogwood blossom and orange construction barrels.
• You know that Andrew Jackson was born in North Carolina, not South Carolina.
• Saying you’re “so ill” usually doesn’t mean that you’re sick.
• You know what sand gnats are.
• You pick pecans off the ground and eat them.
• You know it’s not proper for a woman to wear pants to church.
• You know what “I swanny!” means.
• You have noticed “that boy ain’t right.”
• You call a stomach bulge a pooch.

From Sarah Johnson, Denver 

• You’ve had a Musterole plaster placed on your chest for a cold.
• You’ve heard that a turtle will grab your finger and not turn it loose until it thunders.
• You had sweet water for a beverage at
  Sunday dinner.
• You’ve had okra stewed in cabbage.

From Rebecca Woodruff White, Lincolnton (formerly of Boonville)

• You used a stump in the woods for your playhouse table, leaves for plates, acorn hulls for cups and sticks for your forks, spoons and knives.
• You know ‘shine and brown sugar make the best cough medicine in the world.
• You rolled the tobacco gum off your hands into a ball and saved it all summer, and whoever had the biggest gumball when the tobacco was all cured was the one who had worked the hardest.
• If you had the biggest gumball, you might get an extra nickel.
• You turned tobacco worms wrong-side out with your forefinger to impress the girls.

From Joy Horrell, Garland

• Your mama caught white-faced bumblebees in her hand to show they won’t sting, but you were too afraid to try it.
• You picked cucumbers by looking through the vines with a paddle made out of a tobacco stick.
• You had to drive the Farmall while Mama and Daddy picked up corn to feed the hogs.
• To cure your earache, your mama put Vicks in your ear and stuffed in a piece of cotton from an aspirin bottle.
• You and your mama went to the woods huckleberrying every summer and then had to take a quick bath when you got home to wash off the redbugs.
• You ate cracklins and a fresh baked sweet potato.

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