Bless Your Heart

Growing up Southern, I got to hear a lot of coded language.

Instead of being angry, someone might be madder than a wet hen. Instead of an idea that wouldn’t work for some practical reason, someone might say, “That dog won’t hunt!” Instead of being a braggart, someone was all hat and no cattle.

Most of all, if someone said something naive, embarrassing, or just plain dumb, you weren’t really supposed to tell them so. Instead, you ended up with this weird deflection a lot of Southern people have used for a variety of reasons:

Oh, sweetie! Bless your heart; you thought you could just walk here with that five gallon tub of ice cream, and we could just re-freeze it before tonight’s gala.

The trick here is to soften your criticism with a compliment, so the person walks away feeling gently corrected, not flogged to near-death like a slave. If it seems jarring that I brought up slavery just now, you might want to finish your cup of coffee before reading further.

The phrase seems to have become most prominent during the period immediately following the Civil War. This is probably no wonder, since Southern white men weren’t particularly interested in starting fights at the moment. Social harmony became the dominant paradigm and the ultimate goal.

Prior to this period, murder was one of the preferred ways to settle a score. They called these little one-off battles duels, and they were incredibly common in the South. At least one US President from the South participated in at least a dozen of these life-or-death contests, and he (Jackson) carried the bullet in his chest from one of these for the rest of his life.

One violent era led to a briefer ultra-violent one, and then the Civil War was over.

Better to deflect an offending comment with humor than to die because of an injury to honor. However, it needed to be the right style of comedy, or else wires could get crossed and legitimate anger could arise.

You can see why Southern idioms evolved so much during this period, as the rules that governed the white social order were evolving rapidly. Language is a diverse and resilient technology, and Southerners had little problem repurposing a few existing tools in order to keep the peace.

It became very Southern to be polite, although vitriol could still be encoded alongside the humor, like Foghorn Leghorn telling Yosemite Sam that he’s about as sharp as a bowling ball.

What you don’t want to do is insult Sam’s family, or to call him something directly. Instead, it’s much better to treat an insult as something humorous to be discussed.

Blessing someone’s heart actually sounds pretty good overall, right? It’s not meant to be a cut-down of any kind, and the idea of wishing someone’s heart good tidings (or blessings from a deity) has been in common practice for thousands of years.

Here’s the thing, though: you’re not really talking about their heart when you say something like, bless your heart, you think you’ve seen real passive-aggressive behavior? No, you’re talking about their brain here. You’re celebrating their strong and powerful heart by indirectly comparing it to their brain.

Actually, it’s just the opposite of that.

Now, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that all white Southerners are heartless monsters just waiting to satisfy their ancient bloodlust; now that duels are a thing of the past, the only way we can get our jollies is by indirect insult. In fact, many of the bless-your-hearts you’re likely to hear in the South are legitimate expressions of love or sympathy.

Bless your heart might be a sly insult, but it could just as easily be a word of encouragement. Our language reflects the deep complexity of the culture we live in, and history is often on full display whenever we study etymology.

I grew up around lots of these sorts of phrases, and it wasn’t until years later that I understood how regional some of these phrases are. Have you had a similar thing happen, where you grew up hearing a particular phrase that you later found out was specific to your area?