Text: (Folk Simile/Colloquialism)

“Country as Cowshit”

Context:

T is my mother who lives T heard this from neighbor/friend who lived and grew up deep in the Appalachian Mountains. She lives in Salem, Virginia, but grew up all around the country traveling with her family as her father’s job took them to new locations often. She has lots of folklore experiences from her own family to ones she has heard while traveling and those from the friends she surrounds herself with. She decided to share this simile/colloquialism when I asked for a piece of folklore she has heard a lot.

T- “When someone is describing someone they can’t understand because they talk so country they’ll saw they’re Country as Cow Shit.”

Interviewer- Which means they are from so far out in the country that you can hardly understand what they are saying, like they have a really deep accent?

T- “That’s what country as cow shit means, it means they talk like a hick, yeah, just really hard to understand them, they’re just very country.”

T told a story she was told by her friend who she heard it from. T said that he would talk to his wife and call her name and his wife would call his name back, and no one else knew what their names were because they couldn’t understand what they were saying. He would call her and people thought her name was “Janey” and people thought that his name was “Mack” (neither names are their actual names).

Analysis:

In my interpretation this can be seen as something that is silly and said lightheartedly back and forth to one another, or it could come off as an insult to a group of people. I have heard this expression myself before, and in most cases it is other people who are country (but not as country) have said this either about someone or right in front of them. When looking it up, it seems to actually be the title of a country song, on Spotify and Apple Music. The word “cowshit” is similar, but not as popular in my experience as “horseshit” or “bullshit”, both of which are usually used when calling someone’s bluff. The word is described in Green’s Dictionary of Slang as an unpopular person, or nonsense/rubbish. I think the second definition fits best, at least in this saying, as it is saying that the way speak is as country as nonsense.