10 Words South Carolinians Say That Confuse Everyone Else

A transplant asks his Beaufort neighbor when the repairman is coming.

“Directly,” she says, and closes the door.

Three hours later, he’s still waiting because nobody told him that “directly” can mean whenever.

These are the words South Carolinians say that leave the rest of us lost.

Pluff Mud

Walk onto any South Carolina dock at low tide, and the smell reaches you before the view does.

Rotten eggs.

Outsiders scan the marsh for something dead, but the culprit is the black, boot-stealing mud packed along the creek banks.

South Carolinians call it pluff mud, and they say it with affection.

That sulfur punch comes from marsh bacteria chewing through dead cordgrass in the airless muck, not from anything that died.

The same muck feeds the shrimp and blue crabs that end up in the boil.

To a Lowcountry kid, it’s the smell of home.

Cooter

Tell a South Carolinian you saw a cooter, and nobody pictures a cartoon or a mechanic.

Just a turtle.

A cooter is the freshwater turtle that suns itself on logs in ponds and blackwater rivers across the state.

You’ll spot a row of them stacked on a half-sunk log, sliding off the second you get close.

The word traveled here from West Africa, akin to the Bambara and Malinke word kuta for turtle, carried over by enslaved people and kept alive in Lowcountry speech.

Charleston cooks simmered it into cooter soup for generations.

Order that up North, and you’ll get a puzzled look.

Pinder

Ask for pinders at a South Carolina ballgame, and you’re asking for peanuts.

Same goes for goobers.

Both words sailed over from Central Africa, from the Kongo words mpinda and nguba, spoken by the enslaved Africans who grew the crop here.

Boiled, roasted, or dropped straight into a bottle of Coca-Cola, the pinder runs deep in the state’s snack habits.

Roadside stands and gas stations off I-95 sell them boiled by the bagful all summer.

Say goober up North, and people hear an insult.

It’s lunch.

Frogmore Stew

Invite an out-of-towner to a Frogmore stew, and they’ll glance around for frogs.

There aren’t any.

Frogmore stew is the Lowcountry boil: shrimp, smoked sausage, corn, and new potatoes dumped on a newspaper-covered table.

It took its name from Frogmore, a tiny fishing community on St. Helena Island near Beaufort.

Some folks call it a Lowcountry boil or a Beaufort stew, but the shrimpers who named it weren’t fussy about it.

You eat it with your hands, straight off the table, no plates required.

No frogs. Just dinner.

Geechee

Spend time near the South Carolina coast, and somebody will mention being Geechee.

Pure pride.

Geechee refers to the Gullah Geechee people, the descendants of enslaved West Africans who built a culture of their own on the Sea Islands.

They speak Gullah, an English-based creole woven from West African grammar and vocabulary.

You’ve probably borrowed a little of it yourself, if you’ve ever said gumbo or tote.

The sweetgrass baskets sold at Charleston’s City Market come straight from that heritage.

Outsiders hear a thick accent.

Locals hear their grandparents.

The Holy City

Book a weekend in the Holy City, and your map should point you straight to Charleston.

No pilgrimage required.

Charleston earned the nickname from its skyline, where church steeples still rise higher than almost anything else downtown.

The city welcomed Huguenots, Jews, Baptists, and Lutherans back when other colonies picked one faith and stopped there.

Sailors coming into the harbor saw a forest of spires.

St. Philip's and St. Michael's still spike the skyline downtown. The name stuck.

Juke

A South Carolinian might tell a child to quit juking a sibling in the ribs.

It means to poke or jab.

The word comes from Gullah, from joog, meaning wicked or unruly, with roots reaching back to West Africa.

That same word gave the country the juke joint, the little roadhouse where people danced to the blues.

Drop a coin in a jukebox, and you've said it again without knowing.

One small word.

You've been saying it your whole life.

Sandlapper

Call a South Carolinian a sandlapper, and you might get a grin instead of a fight.

A compliment.

The nickname goes back two centuries, aimed at people in the sandy stretches of the state's eastern midlands.

It started as a jab at poor country folks, then got reclaimed the way the best nicknames do.

Now, a sandlapper is anybody proud to call South Carolina home.

Wear it well.

Cackalacky

When a South Carolinian says they're from South Cackalacky, they mean South Carolina.

Nobody agrees.

Where the word came from is anybody's guess, from a Cherokee root to a German word for a cockroach, and none of them hold up.

The plainest answer wins: somebody stretched Carolina into a joke, and it stuck.

Rappers put it in songs in the 1990s, and the nickname spread past the state line.

Silly? Sure.

South Carolinians say it anyway.

Vy-EE-nuh

Watch a South Carolinian pack a cooler for the lake, and a can of vy-EE-nuh sausages goes in every time.

Not vee-EN-uh.

The little canned sausages get a whole new name down here, three drawled syllables that baffle anybody from off.

They ride along on fishing trips, boat days, and dove hunts, usually with a sleeve of saltines and a bottle of hot sauce.