A Southern male leisure activity involving several genres of folk speech and folklore;
also, insulting, self-aggrandizing speech, often in a sports context. The kinds of talk in
“talking trash” in the rural and small-town South are linked by performance context and
by thematic threads of humor and aggressiveness. Roughly equivalent terms for “talking
trash” are “shooting the breeze,” “telling lies,” “bullshitting,” and “talking garbage.”
Trash ranges from casual small talk about favorite activities such as hunting and
fishing, to teasing, joke telling, and formal yarn spinning. Participants exchange
whoppers, traditional tall tales, and stories of exaggerated personal experience.
Whoppers, or exaggerated descriptions, may occur alone, in series, or in a story about
telling a whopper. For example, the whopper “It got so hot last summer my hens laid
hard-boiled eggs,” may occur by itself or in series with other weather-related whoppers.
It may also appear in a story showing how the shrewd country fellow makes a fool of the
visiting city dweller.
Traditional tall tales, another important component of talking trash, have been studied
in many folk cultures and are one of the roots of the humor of the old Southwest in
American literature.
While stories of personal experience may not “go into folk tradition,” the custom of
narrating personal experience is deeply traditional. When men are talking trash, it may be
difficult, and sometimes not especially relevant, to know how much these stories are
based upon fact. The “fish story” in the context of talking trash does not depend on mere
fact for its meaning. This is because when men talk trash, their speech is not so much
“about” the events narrated as it is about the sociable event in which the talking trash
event occurs.
Talking trash with other men increases mutual good feelings among participants, even
when one mans narrative talents lift him above his fellows. The term “master narrator”
was applied by Richard M.Dorson to the expert yarn spinner, or trash talker, who makes a
conscious effort to improve his craft. He is recognized for his large repertoire of tales and
admired as an unusually skillful narrator by his fellows, who enjoy talking trash with him
and telling tales to others about his verbal feats. To support his reputation, gained from
being a character in his own stories, the master narrator cultivates a personal style and an
air of eccentricity. He thrives on the praise of others.
However, master narrators are not typical of trash talkers. All properly sociable men
are expected to be able to contribute a clever experience story or wisecrack to the
conversation. Through talking trash, men make characters of themselves and promote good humor within the group. However good it is, though, the humor found in talking
trash is not gentle. By 1990s mainstream-culture standards, it is rough and violent. It is
the humor of an America that laughed at physical humor in popular knockabout film
comedies—people slipping on banana peels, having pianos fall on them, and being stuck
in the bottom with pitchforks. It is the kind of humor found in old Southwestern humor.
For example, an Afirican American from Georgia narrated the story of a dispute in a
turpentine camp, in which a White supervisor angrily chased a Black worker. The strong
Black man bent a pine sapling until his pursuer came close and then let it snap back,
knocking the White man down hard. The narrator said this was very funny. With or
without racial components, talking trash among both Blacks and Whites in the rural
South demonstrates the participants’ relish in such stories for “cartoon violence.”
In recent years, a second sense of the term “talking trash” has emerged. Related to the
aggressiveness and rough humor of trash talking in the rural South, this is insulting
speech that “trashes” (derides, degrades, hurts) the listener. Examples from the popular
press illustrate this sense of “talking trash.” In a 1993 newspaper article, in North
Carolina, the Charlotte Observer reported: “The South Carolina Supreme Court dealt
chivalry another blow. Talking trash to women and girls is no longer a crime. The
court…threw out a 50-year-old law, saying it’s old-fashioned to think women…need
special protection—in this case, from cuss words, obscenities, or sugges-tive remarks.”
And the national news magazine Newsweek, also in 1993, commented: “[Baseball’s]
strength is also its weakness: It has a corner on the market for nostalgic, romantic sports
hooey, but spectators increasingly favor basketball’s fast-paced, trashtalking, macho
hooey.”
Kay Cothran Craigie
References
Cohen, Hennig, and William B.Dillingham, eds. 1964. Humor of the Old Southwest. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Riverside Editions.
Cothran, Kay L. 1979. TalkingTrash in the Okefenokee Swamp Rim, Georgia. In Readings in
American Folklore, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand. New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 215–235.
Dorson, Richard M. 1944. Maine Master-Narrator. Southern Folklore Quarterly 8:279–285.