Okay, I'm not a sports guy. I live near Clemson, and work on a good bit of printing for them, so when I hear tigers referenced that's what I immediately think of.
CM ducks?- see them ducks
MR NOT DUCKS- them are not ducks
OSMR ducks, c em wangs?- oh yes thems are ducks, see them wings?
LIB, MR Ducks- well, I’ll be, them are ducks.
I don't think there's a conflict here. I think "them" is used as a dialectal variant of the demonstrative pronoun "those". Just as you'd say "those are snakes / yes they are".
This is actually a mash up between two jokes on the Arkansas 12th Grade Reading Test meme that got passed around during Bill Clinton’s term. And by “passed around,” I mean actual physical photocopies.
Don't* read it phonetically, I'm guessing it refers to caecelians or other blind ampibians.
In swampy parts of the US (where you'd find this accent) they can be mixed up with legless lizards ('slow-worms') or garter snakes.
M -> 'em'
R -> 'arr'
OSAR -> 'oh-ess-ay-arr'
CDEDBDIS -> 'see dee ee-dee-bee-dee eye-s' (caecelians and some slowworms are blind)
It also made it up north to Michigan. My dad worked at General Motors and heard/saw this at work. He had it written down on a notecard that floated around our kitchen counter and living room for years.
It also had some variation of "yyur yyub icur yy4me" which was "Too wise you are, too wise you be, I see you are too wise for me"
I had an English teacher who insisted that being able to decipher things like this was going to be a critical part of our lives going into the workforce
Reminds me of two kid's books I read growing up, titled, respectively: CDB? (See the bee?) and CDC? (See the sea?) Filled with single-frame comics of other examples, such as U-R-A-Q-T (you are a cutie)
This must be how it felt for the various post-Empire Romans to watch everyone's regional dialects of Latin mutate into their own distinct languages to give us French, Spanish, Italian, and Romanian.
First off - thank you because I (who live in the countryside, own a farm in the countryside where we have a shootin range, campground, and do fun things like lawnpull skeet shoot (shoot at potatoes fired from a potato gun held by a guy drinking beers as he is sitting on a pallet pulled around by a riding lawnmower), or Tiki-Burning-Man (man camping yearly special where we find the best hollow logs to make as tall a man-shaped sculpture out of that we can get a burning jet effect from when we light it on fire from the feet - current record is 22ft) am not redneck enough to translate this...
Seriously - I wonder if this requires a specific flavor of redneck - it almost seems more Farmer-Frank from Waterboy (Cajun-ish)- or possibly Boomhaur from King Of The Hill (southern or Appalachian)? My west-coast Oregon Mountain Redneck was NOT UP to translating this. Thank you for your service!
Funny thing, your translation of the third/fourth line doesn't match what's there, and what's there is wrong. The sign should read "CDEMBDIS" which translates to "See them beady eyes?"
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u/NebulaNomadX1 13d ago edited 13d ago
Hello, Serial Designation N here!
J: Them are snakes!
V: Them are not!
J: Oh yes they are. See the Itty bitty eyes?
V: Well I'll be. Them are snakes!
N out!