Mesa Musings:

My wife and I have six grandchildren.

We can understand two when they speak, including the youngest, who celebrated her first birthday Sunday. But the other four? It’s getting progressively difficult.

They don’t babble gibberish or speak some primitive Ewok dialect. It’s subtler than that.

The English they speak sounds as much like the language you and I use daily here on the Orange Coast — as our language resembles Low Saxon. My grandchildren and I are ships passing in the night when it comes to understanding one another.

The four youngsters have spent the last five years in bucolic eastern North Carolina. One of the four was born there. The other three, I’m sorry to say, can no longer claim their California roots.

My 9-year-old granddaughter told me on the phone the other day that her class recently visited an aquarium on North Carolina’s spectacular Outer Banks. It’s best, she said, not to go looking for marine critters during “hah tahd.”

Is that a Jewish holiday?

“Hah tahd.”

Hog-tied?

“HAH TAHD, Opa! Kantcha unnerstayund?”

Oh, sorry!

My youngins have gone Confederate on me! They’re part of something so vast that Mr. Mencken recognized it decades ago. Southern accents, which must not be confused with that abomination uttered by Jude Law in “Cold Mountain,” make up the largest accent group in the U.S. In point of fact, there are a great variety of Southern drawls.

My grandparents on both sides were from Arkansas. I have assorted relations in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas. I realize that Oklahoma and Kansas were never part of the Old South, but the accents heard there can be as exaggerated as any you’ll find in Dixie.

If you could have heard my big ol’ great aunts in southeastern Kansas — and, yes folks, they were large, buxom women — speak the language of rural Montgomery County, well you’d have heard as Southern a dialect as you’re ever likely to hear. To them, my first name had two syllables, “Gee-em,” never Jim.

They’d squeal with delight when they saw my bony 12-year-old self climb out of the car when we went “a visitin’,” and they’d pull my tousled head to their ample bosoms and squeeze the stuffing out of me. I’d come up sputtering.

Those women knew how to love on you. And, boy, could they cook! They also did a right fine job of sampling the fruits of their labor. (I won’t even get into the whole “dinner” and “supper” thing.)

I’m told that I had relatives who fought on both sides during the Civil War. Some Arkansans in my family emigrated from Tennessee. Though a Confederate state — and the setting for numerous important battles — Tennessee featured pockets of pro-Union sentiment.

I was born in Orange County in 1945, about as far from chicken and dumplings, corn bread, black-eyed peas, biscuits and gravy and cobbler as you could get at that time. Yet, they were staples of my diet.

I remember that my great grandfather would come west and stay with us for weeks at a time. Every night before bed he’d eat a bowl of mashed corn bread in milk, with sugar sprinkled on top. He slept like a baby. I’d be popping Rolaids ‘til dawn were I to attempt that today!

Whenever we traveled anywhere by car, grandpa would open his door at stop signs and spit tobacco juice on the roadway. Not proper O.C. behavior.

I had my first actual exposure to the South in 1964-65. Uncle Sam sent me to Fort Benning, Ga. I can’t say that this California kid was particularly impressed, but what did I know? I was 19.

I didn’t appreciate the fact that it had been a mere 100 years since Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman had taken his Union Army from Atlanta to Savannah, cutting a swath of devastation through the Peach State. His intention was to “make Georgia howl” and he surely did!

But, my how the South has changed since 1865 — and since 1965! I now spend considerable time there and savor its gracious ways.

Still, there’s that pesky little matter of difficult verbal communication with my grandchildren. Seems we share the same genes but not the same lingua franca.

One happy family, divided by a common language!

JIM CARNETT lives in Costa Mesa. His column runs Wednesdays.