Dear cousins, I didn't get to read any of the responses about the "cup and sasser" until after I wrote in about it (I am wading through 117 emails right now). I don't recognize the email of "JWHART" but they were right, as was Earl and Glenn, about the meaning behind this. However, JWHART referred to this as "very country dialect". Actually, this is, contrary to modern English teachers, not a real "dialect" but something much more closer to pure English than anything else you can find in America outside the South. I recall my English professor in college asking the class where we would find the "purest English spoken as it was spoken by the English in the 1600's through the 1700's. I just smiled and waited for the class to respond because I knew no one else would agree with me. Two responded "in the Appalachian mountains" (from north Georgia through Tennessee, the Carolinas to Virginia). The prof saw me smiling and told the class "Alright, Mr. Woodham has that sneaky little grin on his face as though he knows something...let's see." I explained that even the folk in the Appalachians had had their language corrupted by outside influences--especially the Scots from lowland North Carolina and the Germans from Pennsylvania/to western NC/to Tennessee. So, the ONLY region of the entire nation which had (back then) not been corrupted (our professor said "bastardized") by outside language influences was in the Ozark Mountains region of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri. These folk STILL speak a language MOST CLOSELY akin to late Middle English than any other folk in America today. Since I was a kid in the 1950's, other regions of the South have had their language influenced strongly by radio and television, as well as by a huge influx of folk from up north and other foreigners. Atlanta, for instance, now has more than 50,000 residents born in India !! As well as many Arabs, Italians, Nigerians, Japanese and from just about every nation in the world. Same for most of the rest of the major cities in the South. Columbus, Georgia where I live is not a "major" city but is a metropolitan city of more than a quarter million folks. But is has been a major military center since the 1940's. That has attracted a huge number of foreigners here. Until Christmas, I worked at a plant where the majority of the 300 or more workers were from Mexico (most illegals). My step-dad's next door neighbors are from Peru; across the steet is a family from Nigeria. I guarantee you that the children now in school do not speak like my grandparents, nor do I speak as I did as a child. I bemoan the change of our speech every day and especially how technocrats are changing its written form as well. No longer is the northern suburbs of Atlanta the "suburbs". They are now the "exurbs" (beyond the "suburbs"). "Pot" is no longer something we cook in (or put under the bed) but something that is smoked. The influence of foreign languages upon our English language has been tremendous because of the disproportionate because of the location of our television centers in New York City. Need we say anything more? But as to the "dialect"... one encycopaedia contends that a dialect is the way people talk in a certain district of a county and that it differs from "accepted speech patterns". It used the way people in New England speak: idear (idea) or caah (car) as examples. The writer is one of those poor bewildered followers of the idea that the "king's English" is the only acceptable one. HOGWASH! The "king's English was introduced to England by the Norman French and they have tried ever since to destroy the REAL English language. In fact, it was outlawed as a written language for centuries and Latin and French substituted for it. I fear we are fighting a losing battle though. In another hundred years, what we speak today will not be understood. After all, one out of every four people in the world today is Chinese. Robert Earl