fixin'

I spent two days in southern Louisiana recently, and I have to say, I’m always intrigued by the way people talk in that region of the country. Of course, it’s all a matter of perspective; I don’t have an accent, they do. Singer-songwriter Tom Petty calls it the “southern accent,” others call it the “southern drawl.” No matter the delivery style, I’m most interested in the words Southerners use to describe certain actions.

I boarded an Embraer ERJ-145 Jet bound for Dallas out of Baton Rouge on a stormy Friday evening. With two flight legs and over six hours to reach my destination, I was hoping to relax a little. I had checked the weather earlier in the day and expected clear skies all the way. However, Wunderground must not know about those sudden Dixie Storms. At 4 pm, the sky was clear and it was 90 degrees in Baton Rouge. At 5pm, as I headed for the airport, the rainstorm that had rushed in from nowhere was so heavy, and the clouds were so dark, visibility was down to about 20 feet on the crowded highway.

As I attempted to dry off my soaking shoes and backpack at the airport terminal, the power cycled on and off as if someone with OCD was flipping a light switch up and down, up and down. It was unnerving enough to experience sudden and total darkness in the terminal, followed by equally sudden blinding light. But the most annoying part was the Muzak, which eerily cranked itself up to the highest volume possible over the loudspeaker system, and blared out a string of forgettable tunes like Girl From Ipanema and Tara’s Theme from Gone with the Wind. Peoples’ hair stood on end as the wall of sound slaughtered their eardrums.

Don’t worry. I’m fixin’ to get to the point.

I was ready to use my computer case as a pillow and hope for a wink of sleep in the cold terminal when the power cycled on for the third time. The rattled flight attendant announced our late-arriving flight and insisted that we all charge forward poste-haste and board as quickly as possible so we could “get outta here.” Hey, we were all for that. Just before that dubiously hopeful announcement came, I was fixin’ to call home with the news that I could be later than my scheduled 1:30 am arrival.

We quickly boarded and settled in to the small jet while the pilot and co-pilot repeatedly started up and shut down the engines. As with the black-white-black-white experience of the terminal, we jostled around, fixin’ to settle into our seats as they reset the onboard computers, which had malfunctioned due to the lightning storm.

But the storm was headed east, and we were ostensibly headed west. (I know, I know, Detroit is east of Baton Rouge, but the airline industry likes to show you around the country more than it likes to deliver you direct.) While the crew fiddled with the aircraft electrical systems, a young man seated in front of me called home one last time before takeoff. I couldn’t help but listen, since he was fairly shouting his conversation into the already bleeding ears of his fellow passengers. “Ahm fixin’ to come home,” he said in the most indescribable dialect.

Where had I heard that before? My mind wandered back to college days in East Texas, where some of my friends owned various forms of the classic southern accent. It seemed to me they were always fixin’ to do something. But honestly, I never quite connected with the supposed meaning of fixin’ until today. It seems the term was coined in Texas (Crawford’s George W. loves to sprinkle his own form of English with the occasional fixin’); and apparently its origin links to fixing one’s gaze through a gun sight. Well that figures: the common assumption is that everyone owns a gun in Texas. According to Cathy Frye of the Beaumont Enterprise, the average Texas household probably has at least one firearm, whether it's kept in the bedroom or a shotgun rack. I suspect Michigan runs a close second to Texas. Anyhow, I’d best be fixin’ my sights on other topics before I run amok here.

References
Guns in America, Part III: Texans' close ties with guns foster favorable views, laws, CATHY FRYE © 1997 Beaumont Enterprise

Some possibly interesting reading:
Fixin' To Be Texan (Paperback) by Helen Bryant

The Yankee Chick's Survival Guide to Texas by Sophia Dembling

The Southern Word Homepage (although fixin's not listed, it's still an interesting walk through southern word usage and pronunciation). By Patrick Crispen, University of Alabama class of 1998.