Bra Hoppers

I grew up in a small village about 25 miles north of Cincinnati. The area had a lot of Kentuckians settled there, as you could tell by the accents. My dad was 'from the head of a holler' as he often put it, so I grew up around that soft southern accent. As a teenager, I strived to eliminate the southernisms from my speech and I pretty much sounded like a Yankee when I moved to Tennessee 13 years ago.

The people in that area of Ohio looked down on the transplanted Kentuckians. There were large areas around there where the accents were thicker'n gravy and those areas tended to be more economically poor. They had their own culture and the stores and restaurants there catered to their tastes.

I heard a lot of derogatory names spewed forth in my lifetime about the transplanted Kentuckians, one of the more gentler and somewhat humorous was 'brier hopper'. With the southern Kentucky accent, it became 'bra hopper'. It was a term they used among themselves as well. My dad never did, but then Dad wouldn't have thought it a proper word, but you would often hear someone say, when asked where they were from "Oh, I'm just an ole Bra Hopper."

I hear that term when I was back in Ohio last week and it made me smile.