‘Sweet Magnolias” Southern Idioms Are Out of Control

If you’re from the south, then you know what “knee high to a grasshopper” means. You’ve heard your grandma say “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.” You’ve maybe even said “the porch light’s on but no one’s home.” Southerners love a folksy idiom, and Sweet Magnolias — the most country-fried drama on Netflix — is smellin’ what they’re are steppin’ in.

Every single episode — hell, every scene! — has some sorta saying that screams, “This show is set in a fictional town in South Carolina!” But, and I say this as someone born and raised in Tennessee, the idioms on Sweet Magnolias are out of control. These idioms go beyond the known boundaries of folksy sayings and enter into an almost surrealist landscape dotted with dilapidated barns, lightning bugs, and porch swings. They don’t make a lick of sense, and that’s saying something since you’ve definitely heard a relative say “finer than frog hair split four ways.”

Now, Sweet Magnolias gets some sayings right. They pepper those in every few episodes, maybe to get southerners on their side. There’s the one that everyone, even Yankees, know:

This one’s just a plain ol’ idiom, one that roams all around America.

And then there are some that struck me as bizarre but, after a Google, turns out they’re legit!

Then there are some that are just so off that they tickle the ear a little.

And then there’s Serenity’s star attorney Helen Decatur, a woman who has never met an idiom that she cannot turn into a full blown poem.

Idioms are so ingrained in this show that characters have entire exchanges with them.

And some of these idioms come back for more episodes later!

Then there’s whatever this is:

This right here broke my brain. Why is the cat busy? Are cats known for leaping from rocking chair to rocking chair? Is the cat repairing the rocking chairs? Best I can tell, this is a real Frankenstein’s monster of southern sayings. It’s half “busier than a cat covering crap on a marble floor” and half “nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs” — which is such a famous, quintessential southernism that it was used in the premiere episode of X-Men.

As wild as that one is, it’s nothing compared to the ones that the mad geniuses on the Sweet Magnolias writing staff make up whole cloth. There are multiple idioms that involve swimming…

I tell you what — it is hard to swim upstream, especially if your hands are full of anything other than water!

Then there’s this exchange, which are real words that two lovely people say to each other without batting an eye.

Okay, first: jackdaws are inquisitive birds found in Europe and Asia… so, not South Carolina. Second: besieged by wagging tongues and vivid imaginations? These two want everyone in the spa to know that they’ve been to college.

And just to keep it going, there’s all this, which I don’t even know what to do with. Please enjoy them as much as I do.

All of these get zero Google results, so unless there’s a big tome called A Mouthful of Granpappy’s Ol’ Fashioned Southern Sayings that’s yet to be digitized, I think it’s safe to say that all of these are Sweet Magnolias originals. And you gotta give it to the citizens of Serenity, South Carolina: they all got quick wits and colorful imaginations to think of “bat with a hearing aid” on the fly. But I gotta tell ya — hearing characters talk like this as if these are legit Southern idioms that’ve been passed down from generation to generation? It makes me so confused that I can’t find Thursday from a funnel cake!

Stream Sweet Magnolias on Netflix