“SHE JUST CALLED YOU HONEY”: MY QUANDARY AT WAFFLE HOUSE

Abstract

My wife and I arrived in Mobile four years ago. As we drove from Pennsylvania into the deep South, I began to notice the subtle changes that became increasingly less subtle, not least of which was the stifling humidity. It was bad in Pennsylvania, but I am from California where we generally don't have humidity that you can see. But another change that we began to notice in our eventful four day excursion to the other side of the Mason--Dixon Line was the food. I have an affinity for truck stops because, when it comes to food, I like quantity almost as much as I like quality. We began seeing things that were foreign to us like grits, collard greens, and field peas. People also started to sound different the further south we went. We stopped at a truck stop Wendy's in Georgia and participated in the following exchange: Young Man at Register: What can I get y'all? Me: I'll have the bacon cheeseburger and a chicken sandwich. Rebecca: I'll have the salad. Young Man at Register: What kind of dressing? We'll stop here to note that the young man was mumbling because he was scared as hell, this being his first day on the job with a line a mile long at a busy travel plaza. But he had other things to be scared of as well. We had watched his supervisor, a rather loud African-American woman telling him how to do things. Just then, she exclaimed, Supervisor: You say sir and ma'am or smack you! Rebecca and I mentally thought, Holy crap! We believed that it was going to happen right there in front of us. But the problem was that neither Rebecca nor I could understand what the person behind the register was asking because of his thick accent. Thus, the exchange continued: Rebecca: What? Young Man at Register: What kind of dressing do you want? (still unintelligible) Rebecca: I can't understand what you're asking. Finally, much to the relief of both the young man at the register and the people behind us, we realized that he was asking about the salad dressing. We resolved that whatever ended up in the bag was what we would get because we really didn't want to try to decipher the language and we definitely didn't want the poor guy to get smacked by the supervisor. We arrived in Mobile with an over-heated car and a heavily loaded moving truck, barely making it to the apartment complex where we would be living before the rental office closed. By the time we had taken care of the lease agreement, retrieved our over-heated car from the parking lot where we had ditched it, and unloaded some of the essentials, we realized that we were hungry and that it was well past when respectable establishments would be open. Thus, our first meal in our new home was had at Waffle House. I had only heard of Waffle House but had never been to one. The first time we had seen them was on the way down south. I believe that it is important to explain the worldview in which I operate. I am beginning to say things like y'all and am developing a taste for collard greens and grits, but I am still a Westerner at heart. Thus, I am completely unfamiliar with many of the unspoken linguistic rules that Southerners seem to take for granted. In the dialogues between the waitresses and the patrons, relationships are being established, defined, and negotiated--relationships that are, in many ways, new to me. In this essay, I will examine a particular linguistic strategy that I have observed in waitresses at Waffle House: the use of the epithet honey. Discourses rarely have single interpretations, but by carefully examining a particular discourse, one can distill possible interpretations of how it functions rhetorically. I suggest that the waitresses at Waffle House engage in rhetorical strategies that help (re)define the relationship between the customers and themselves. To support this claim, I will consider how the architecture of Waffle House provides a space where an intimate relationship can be proposed, the way the use of the term honey proposes a particular, if ambiguous, relationship between the waitress and customer, how this relationship may be interpreted, especially from the standpoint of a cultural outsider such as myself, and the consequences of such a relationship. …

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