Dear Dixie and all, Now Dixie, with a name like yours, "chile, you are posed to know bout sich things". That is pure DIXIE talk. "gemmans sasser" is the "gentleman's saucer". Tain't got nothing to do with whiskey cause Southern men, whether gentlemen or not, don't drink their liquor from a "sasser". That's for coffee and in pioneer times, tea. Note in the reference that tea and coffee are referred to. Southerners liked to cool their coffee and tea by pouring a tad into the saucer to cool and often drank it straight from the saucer also. My grandparents did this and I copied them until I left for the big city where "modern" city folk frowned upon the practice so I quit. The reference in the folk poem to a "sasser drap" means that someone has dropped the saucer. The last three lines of the poem An' nest, I heerd a sasser drap, - Then I looked up, an' strange to state, There S'repty set in Tomps's lap - Translation: And next, I heard a saucer drop, Then I looked up and strange to say, There was Serepty sitting in Thompson's (or Thomas') lap. The "gal" is the actual pronounciation of gearl (and other spellings), a Middle English term for a young woman. Hominy is boiled corn. Grits are made from hominy. Written casual rural Southern conversation never seems to come out understandably but neither does that of someone from London, England nor some of the rural areas of England. And try reading Chaucer... For that matter, try reading a will or other long document from England from the 1500's or 1600's. You can't understand many of the words UNLESS you might have been born on a Southern farm and are familiar with old farm tools and household goods. I have found some of these old English records to be a marvel for understanding the lives of ordinary folk back then. Some of the wills named each and every little item in an entire household. And you didn't just say a "bed". What you slept on consisted of the "bedstead" (I grew up accustomed to this term) which they thought of merely as the bedframe; the mattress, the pillows, the bed sheets, the bed cover and the pillow cover. They did not always use these terms. I have a devil of a time deciphering the word (poor writing also) in one document for a pillow casing. Robert Earl