Dialect nerding with Mris

[mrissa]

Okay, another dialect question. Haven’t done one in awhile. Does your home dialect contain the phrase “a goin’ concern,” usually applied to small children? And if not, would you still have some sense of what “that child is a goin’ concern” might mean if someone else used it, or would you be completely in the dark?

(Sometimes when I’m talking to my grandmother things come out of my mouth that I never, ever say to my friends, and then I stop and realize that I have no idea if I don’t say them because it’s an old-fashioned phrase we just don’t really use or if I don’t say them because my friends would find me incomprehensible. And this is what the internet is for! Someone might have told you it was for porn. Someone nicer might have told you it was for kitten pictures. They were wrong, or rather, they were right but in the broader sense. It is for assuaging random curiosity. And I do have a most ‘satiable curtiosity.)

Also: if you are a person who says “a goin’ concern,” at what age does a person stop being a goin’ concern? Because I am now a little worried.

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Tennessee/Georgia/East Texas family, I grew up in West Texas. Most of Fidelio's observations resonate with me, though I'd use it rarely if ever, and always in the business sense. Which would mean that the (small town, single owner/proprietor (never corporation) business had got into the black, was self-supporting, growing.

Tho someone's explanation of 'sold as a going concern' would make sense, and I might say that myself.

"The fight was still a goin' concern when me and Dad and Tommy went out the back door of the bar.

The fight hadn't begun to wind down. Everybody was still going at it with full energy, and new fighters may have been joining. -- I wouldn't say it, and I'd hear it as something that belonged in Mark Twain, or that my father (born in1903 in Georgia) might say, more or less humorously. But I understood it immediately.

***For the record, he mused how anyone with so little good sense could continue as a going concern (mother-in-law) and admired that "at her age and all she's still a goin' concern, putting in her garden ever' year and hangin' the washin' out on the line ever' week." (Grandmother-in-law)

Independent, self-sufficient, having steady or increasing energy.