There’s No ‘S’ In Kroger, And Other Fun Southern Facts

The South is an interesting area, especially if you’re not from the South. When you live here, everything weird about the place seems entirely normal. Which can be confusing at first, but you get used to it. You know, like with a hot tub.

Yes, we have hot tubs in the Deep South, for some reason. No one really knows why we have them or where they came from, but you’ll find them at high end hotels and in the backyards of guys with names like Larry who wear gold medallions and have way too much back hair. It doesn’t matter that our default climate is roughly ten degrees hotter than the center of the sun, either. We gonna do what we gonna do, y’all.

Of course, before you start entertaining in your high class hot tub, you’ll probably want to swing by the store to pick up some chips and dip or whatever. When you do this, you’ll likely either say you’re going to Kroger’s or The Walmarts. There is no S in either store, but don’t let that stop you from adding them. You don't want to seem like a tourist.

I feel like I might be making too much out of this whole hot tub thing, though. We don’t actually have that many around the South, but just the fact that they exist at all in a place where the sun is trying to kill us explains pretty much everything anyone ever needs to know about what it takes to be a Southerner. It takes grit and determination, and it helps if you're just a little bit mental.

The people who originally settled the Deep South in the days before air conditioning either had to be insane in the first place, or the heat got to them and they went a little crazy after they got here. Either way, their descendants inherited the trait, so we're all a little mad here. It's a lot like Alice In Wonderland, but with fewer Chesire Cats and more Swamp People.

You also don’t want to be anywhere near a hot tub during mosquito season, which lasts from approximately January 1 through December 31 each year. The little bloodsuckers love to congregate around bodies of water, which explains why a swarm of mosquitoes is called a Louisiana. (Technically, it’s called a Scourge, but who cares? Louisiana is underwater, like, 90% of the time anyway, so our name is more accurate.)

Okay, enough about the hot tubs. I feel like I've focused on them way more than should be legal, so let's move on to some other fun Southern facts.

Did you know that you can buy “a couple couches” on Craigslist if you live in the South? In other parts of the country, you’d just be buying a couple of couches, but around here, we don’t take kindly to putting words like “of” into sentences unless we absolutely have to.

Speaking of which, we have all sorts of fun with language. Jeff Foxworthy has built his career around the idea that Southerners think grammar is something that happens to other people, so he must be on to something. Sure, we pronounce things funny, but we think our Southern drawl is pretty sexy. We also do fun things like drop the T off of any word that ends in -PT. Why? Who knows! It might take you awhile to adap to the concep, but you'll get there.

In Louisiana, we also say weird things like “Make groceries” when we’re fixin’ to go to Kroger’s for some boudin. Over in Texas, they like to say “That dog won’t hunt” whenever they mean to say something’s a bad idea, but don’t feel like making sense to outsiders.

That’s just how we talk, though. When it comes to the written word, all bets are off.

We pluralize words by adding an apostrophe S, and no one notices that we’re not trying to say our Delicious Burger’s own property. We also use quotation marks for emphasis, so you know that our Delicious Burger’s contain “real” meat, and no one calls the health department on us.

Here’s a quick rundown of just a few Rules of Southern Grammar:

• An and and are interchangeable
• Are and or are the same words
• Commas are, used best, when inserted into, a sentence at, random.
• Your and you're mean the same thing, as do its and it's, and there, their, and they're
• Run and ran are the same tense, as are see, seen, and saw

In case you ain’t seen what we done up there an you’re confused, don’t worry. It’s totally normal.

People not from the South tend to give people who live here a hard time, but we’re actually really nice people once you get to know us. Swing on by, and we’ll fix you some sweet tea and sit out on the porch if the skeeters ain’t too bad. If you want, we can even head over to Larry’s and hop in his hot tub.

He's got boudin!