Southern Chicken Tetrazzini Casserole

Honey. Sugar. Sweetie. Spend enough time in the South, and you’ll notice our language is syrupy, the words saccharine, and your mood sanguine.

To a Southerner, every living, breathing soul is coated in sugar.

What I love most about our sugary language is its inability to settle. We start with a base: honey, for example. Before long, honey has morphed into any number of variants: honey-pie, honeybee, honey-baby, honey-bunch, hun. It’s as if any single sweet ingredient can produce a tableful of desserts. A whole linguistic menu with which to greet your neighbors.

Naturally, people across our wide-reaching country continue to use pet names — food-inspired and otherwise — mostly in whispers. In the South, we don’t reserve our sweet language for our partners behind closed doors. We’re public and egalitarian with our endearment.

I’m sugared and sweetied a few times a day — at gas stations and restaurants and coffee shops. I hardly notice it. As if the air itself were laced with powdered sugar, I inhale this language without a second thought.

It’s the intimacy that’s unnerving and welcoming, all in one breath. And therein lies the beauty of our unhealthy language. With every peach and sweet pea, we fling open that tiny, delicately wrapped box of private language and give it freely to anyone we meet. Our tongues suggest we care for everyone as we would a son or daughter. On the tailwinds of a word like sugar-pie flies the suggestion that we will feed and house and care for this stranger. We’re a step away from asking — as my grandmothers always have — for a little sugar on the cheek.

Naturally, not everyone welcomes this intimacy. Not everyone wants to be linguistically adopted by a barista or store clerk. Sometimes people merely want a latte or a pack of gum, not an invitation to Sunday dinner. I understand. But just keep breathing that sweet air. You’ll adapt. This combination of intimacy and indulgence gives strangers a sense that It’s not only, Come to Sunday dinner. It’s also, we’d love to have you.

Whatever the future holds for our honey-dripping words, may we cling to the openness of our language. May we always make the stranger family, the newcomer an old friend. After all, our identities are stuck to these words. They define and reflect us, all in one breath. If you are what you eat, you are also what you speak, and Sugar, in the South, the two happen to be one and the same.