I’m glad you mentioned “up’n”. I heard a lot of “up’n” growing up in rural NC. In my later linguistic life I decided that it was a substitute for “suddenly”, since that is usually what it meant and I don’t recall hearing that word when I lived down there. There are other words which just don’t exist in Southernese. I recall first hearing “must” in high school when I was 17–from a Yankee. We only used “hafta”. Also, “very” was never used by real Southerners, only “mighty” or “awfully”.

The lexical differences between Southern and other dialects are considerable.

My two years in the Army were a happy hunting ground for researching “real” English. All the memorable examples come from the South. I recall an old sargeant whose past tense of reach was “retch” and of climb was “clumb.” An insructor from the south never said “when” in referring to a past event; it was always “whenever” even referring to a known past time. And then there was the modal auxiliary “to up’n”, meaning something like “to decide to.” “He up’n and gimme me a cup of coffee.”

I spent far too much time reading your stuff, and I enjoy every moment of it. Thank you.