Has this NC man got a pun for you — 10,000 of them, all using his ‘country slang’

In a triumphant moment of regional pride, James Locklear drove his ‘57 Chevy to the road sign outside his hometown of Wakulla, which welcomed motorists to the cypress swamps of Robeson County.

He stepped outside, grinned into his phone camera and said, “The word of the day is Wakulla. Like my hometown between Red Springs and Maxton. But here’s the way we use it in a sentence.”

Then he pointed the camera at his classic car, sporting a coat of primer gray.

“Hey man,” he said, giggling. “Wakulla you gonna paint your car?”

And the Internet laughed along.

For the last five years or so, Locklear has posted his country-slang vocabulary lessons nearly every day on Facebook, sometimes collecting page views into the thousands but always delivering a much-needed diversion into humor that drips with red-eye gravy.



“The word of the day is agitator,” he joked recently. “Sis, it tastes so good you need to agitator salad to the menu for Thanksgiving.”

Steeped in rural dialect

At 55, Locklear edits and publishes Native Visions in Pembroke, a magazine dedicated to the issues and personalities of the Lumbee tribe, of which he is a member. Despite shoulder injuries and a bad hip, he still delivers all 10,000 copies by hand — a chore that inspired another recent pun:

“The word of the day is wholesome,” he said. “Man, this truck’ll wholesome papers right here.”

As a lifelong resident of Robeson County, which has a smaller population than Cary but beats Wake County in Piggly Wiggly locations by a 4-0 margin, Locklear boasts a vocabulary steeped in rural dialect, peppered with double negatives.

Country puns occur to him at random, as if delivered from a tin-roof heaven, and he carries a pen at all times in case homey inspiration strikes. To date, Locklear has more than 10,000 cards in a plastic box on his desk, each one carrying a rustic gem.

“The word of the day is helix,” he said. “That boy looks funny when helix ice cream.”

The art of country slang eludes much of Raleigh, whose residents — let’s face it — increasingly hail from states that enunciate the “g” in their “ing” words.

I’ve lived in North Carolina for 23 years, longer than anywhere else in my life, and I’ve paddled a canoe through the tea-colored water of the Lumber River at least three times. Still my birth certificate has California stamped on it, and my Fayetteville-native spouse likes to point out that I speak like a TV weatherman — free of any discernible style.

Even growing up mostly in Maryland, a state that technically falls south of the Mason-Dixon line, I recall being bewildered the first time I asked a rural sheriff how his day was going and he replied, “Man, I’m wide open.”

I stammered, “Uh, good?”

Speech with distinction

But Locklear knows that any speech with distinction is worth preserving, especially when employed by a population as diverse as Robeson’s: 29% white, 23% Black, 43% American Indian. His Facebook jokes land well because anybody can identify, especially if they’ve watched fireworks from the back of a pickup or cursed out loud in a Walmart.

Before publishing Native Visions, Locklear wrote for the Red Springs Citizen, and he sometimes wrote his columns entirely in phonetically accurate jargon. He found that keeping faithful to Robeson-speak could be as taxing a chore as following the King’s English. You had to butcher things just right. But when delivered accurately, it provided even greater audience rewards.

“It’s not just Lumbee slang,” Locklear said. “It’s not just Robeson County slang. It’s everybody slang. People have enough to be stressed out over. What I try to provide is an outlet. I try to provide laughter. Laughter is good medicine for the soul.”

And with that, he offered this parting gift.

“The word of day is gulp,” he said, recalling his latest joke. “Man, I’m gonna gulp side your head if you don’t quit.”