I grew up in Colorado and then moved to Idaho. My folks were born and raised in New York City and New York is where most of my relatives lived for much of my life. Other than occasionally on TV, New York accents were about the only accents I was really accustomed to hearing.

In the mid-90’s I was part of a team who was working on a project that primarily took place in Nashville. There were eight of us on this team, all from different offices within the Company. I was the only one who did not live in the South, two of them were from the Nashville area. I had been to that office a couple of times and over the years had been on the phone with some of my Nashville co-workers.

Our first day in Nashville to begin work on this project, we took a lunch break and it was decided that I would drive to where we were going to eat. I don’t know why I was the one driving since clearly I was not a local. This lunch outing would truly be my first introduction to the southern language. Most of these gals had as much fun with sarcasm as I have so … you can imagine the fun we had understanding each other. There were 5 of us who went to lunch that day.

I was guided to turn onto a road and then told to go ‘yonder firpiece’. For the first time in my interactions with my Nashville co-workers, I really felt like they were speaking a different language. I first asked how far ‘yonder is’. I would think that at least one of them would know how far ‘yonder’ is but I could not get a clear answer. I could let that go because from time to time we all say something like, go that way for a bit, a ways, etc but … what is a firpiece? When I questioned the definition of a firpiece’, we all laughed so hard I thought I’d have to pull over.

I can tell you that the only answer I got was that ‘firpiece’ is actually, ‘for a piece’. When we got to the restaurant it was a BBQ diner. I’m not a big BBQ fan but hey, when in Rome. I looked at the menu and had a tough time figuring out what to order. I wanted some basics since I was unfamiliar with most of the items listed. (I never imagined how different our foods were.) I ordered pork, corn bread, beans and hominy. When my plate was ready there was shredded meat, a pancake, bbq beans and the hominy. I went back to the ordering counter and told the gal that I got a pancake (I’m not fond of pancakes) instead of corn bread. … you guessed it, that was my corn bread.

One time in a restaurant the waitress asked me if I wanted a ‘coke’. I asked if that was the only ‘pop’ they had. She looked as stumped as I had felt on the drive to the BBQ diner. She said we have coke or water or sweet tea. I thought it was odd that they only carried coke. When the laughter at the table subsided I learned that ‘coke’ was the term for any soft drink just like the word ‘pop’ is to me.

I loved these gals and we worked together on this project for about a year and a half. I can’t tell you the numbers of times we teased and laughed about the differences in our food and language.