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- Well-bred Southerners prize humility; good breeding transcends geography.
- Compiler’s father coined all vine and no potato, a sharp image for showy people lacking substance.
- Texas echoes Southern roots; eastern parts keep a Southern flavor, with Dallas Southern and Fort Worth Western.
- Texas saying Big hat, no cattle matches the point; compiler dons a straw hat and plants potatoes for real harvest.
Your compiler had a hard time titling this post, but was put in mind of the eventual title by our recent discussion on people who crow – who brag and show-off loudly and grandly. Many, if not most of that ilk have precious little to be bragging about; they’re generally people who run around acting like big shots.
Your compiler is aware there’s a school of thought that says, “It ain’t bragging if you’ve done it,” but he respectfully disagrees. Continually talking about something one owns or has done can serve only to drive wedges and build resentment between you and those who have not been so fortunate. Most of us realize that, and consequently we don’t traipse around acting like narcissistic high-hats who are legends only in their own minds. Well-bred Southerners seem to get this instinctively – for that matter, well-bred folks from anywhere seem to get this instinctively, for as much as your compiler might like to claim good breeding belongs only to the South, it in truth knows no geographic bounds.
For those who do not quite understand the tree we’re barking up yet, there are at least a couple of terms that might help to elucidate things for you. Your compiler can hear his late father’s voice across the years, talking about one of the most self-aggrandizing individuals who ever walked the face of the earth. “That fellow’s all vine and no potato,” your compiler’s father would snort derisively. Those seven words paint a compelling picture, do they not? “All vine and no potato. All fluff and no substance. All fakery and no reality. All self-aggrandization and no humility.
Head out west to Texas, which was settled largely by folks from the Old South, and you’re liable to find the eastern part of the state still has a distinctly Southern flavor. Dallas, conventional wisdom tells us, is more a Southern city than anything, while Fort Worth, just a few miles on toward the setting sun, is more of a Western one in character. There may be truth to that, but your compiler digresses.
But kid yourselves not, Texans know about the kind of posers your compiler writes of, but they don’t talk much about potatoes and vines. There, the phrase becomes, “Big hat, no cattle.” It all means the same thing – somebody who talks big and stomps around the post office on Saturday mornings like a hot shot, but who has little or nothing to back it up. About the only thing your compiler can imagine that’s worse than being called such a charlatan would be to be one, Lord forbid! And with that observation, your compiler thinks he’ll put on his straw farm hat (which was not high to begin with, but which is rather flat since it blew off his head and the tractor ran over it) and go out and plant some potatoes for harvest this fall. He sincerely hopes they produce more than vines.
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