Ya'll may not know this, but my people come from the South. As such I spent a lot of time with aunts, uncles, and grandparents during the long, muggy summers. I've eaten squirrel, coon, possum, rabbit, deer, bear, and stuff in stews that's best not asked about.

That was a partic'lar trial, I must say, on account of my feelin' a deep measure of sympathy for the poor critters my kinfolk hunted and/or trapped. I ate a lot of bread-n-butter pickles, those long, hot summers. I learned the vernacular as well. Certain expressions stay with me to this day, along with less sophisticated customs like refusing to wear shoes anywhere within a block of my own home. It's dead lucky the climate here favors this vagary.

At any rate, today I want to talk about a phrase that has a special place in my heart. Fixin' to. I don't know how many times I heard my grandpa say, "I'm fixin' to mow the grass," as he plopped down in a rocking chair on the porch. This actually means he'll do it whenever he damn well feels like it. This applies to almost any chore that needs doing. If the man of the house prefaces the task with "I'm fixin' to," then you really shouldn't expect it to be done before next week.

Understandably, the womenfolk get all het up over it. There's only one thing a woman can do in this situation, I'm afraid. And that's plop down on the porch beside her man, heave a heavy sigh, get real easy in her chair, and say, "Yep, and I'm fixin' to make dinner."

You watch how fast that man will mow the grass then. Southern women have a lot of power; with their sweet honeyed drawls, they can get away with saying things that would get a Yankee bitch-slapped. I watched it with my aunties and my grandma at church. They'd all be standing around in gossip knots with sugary smiles, whispering about so-and-so steppin' out on her husband. I always wanted to know where she was steppin', but nobody ever told me.

At such church socials, I learned the Southern woman's secret weapon. You can say anything to anyone and get away with it, if you use this phrase and drawl the insult. Let me teach you how it works.

Say a woman is getting on your nerves because she's trying to impress everyone with how smart she is, but when you get right down to it, she's just using a whole lot of ten dollar words that don't actually mean anything. She's been talking about a proactive unilateral paradigm for the last ten minutes.

Well, if you're a Southern lady, you lean in, put your hand on her arm, and smile real sweet. Then you say, "Bless yer heart, you couldn't light a fire with a book of matches and a can of kerosene, could ye, honey? I'm gone pray for ye, though."

Then you demurely excuse yourself, content in the fact that she'll never figure out you just called her dumber than a box of rocks, Southern style. You also hinted that she's so dumb she needs divine intervention. And those are the magic words: "Bless your heart" and "I'm gone pray for ye, though." You can sandwich the meanest things between those two key phrases and somehow never get bitch-slapped.

But don't forget the drawl. It's a key component in getting away with verbal murder. But kids, I beg you, don't try this with a Jersey accent. It could get ugly.

And that's all for the Mason Dix-ionary this time. I'll have more Southernisms for you soon.