Talking Southern No. 83 : Annuals vs. Yearbooks

July 9, 2026

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     Toward the end of every school year, most students await with wonder – or at least used to – the arrival of their school yearbooks.  It pains your compiler to say that, for when he was coming along in the dark ages of the 1970s, a “yearbook” was a  little paperback volume put out by maybe an elementary school, but an “annual” was the big, thick hardbound book everyone in junior high and high school looked so forward to.   There was as much difference between a yearbook and an annual back then as there is between a Hyundai and a Lexus today.

    While your compiler has made no detailed study on the matter, he is aware that at both his high school (Tucker High, Class of 1981) and at that of his parents (Fayette County High, Class of 1957), what would now be called the “Yearbook Staff” nearly everywhere was referred to as the “Annual Staff.”   When did it change, and why?  Or did it?   (In other words, was “annual” for “yearbook” ever more than a terminology confined in usage to a portion of metro-Atlanta?)   Does anyone know?   Does anyone care?

    Your compiler does, because it feels to him that it is just one more example of Southern speech and habits slipping away without protest in favor of dull, uninteresting, universal robo-speak and behavior.  You may ask, “What’s he talking about?”   Well, here’s just a smattering of  the kinds of things that bother him:

• Nobody eats breakfast, dinner, and supper anymore – it’s almost always breakfast, lunch, and either dinner or supper (but always “supper” if you ask your compiler.)
• Nobody eats syrup anymore – they call it “SEER-up” now, which sounds like something got badly burned on an open fire, instead of “SIR-up” as the Good Lord intended.
• Things don’t happen “by accident” anymore – they happen “on accident,” whatever that means.
• Folks don’t drink buttermilk anymore – which removes the need, unfortunately, for needing to call regular milk “sweet milk.”   (Ask any waitress under about fifty for a glass of sweet milk, and note the deer-in-headlights look you will get.)
• Everybody in the church world these days seems to want to call the anteroom of a church a “narthex,” which, to your compiler, sounds like a highly contagious bacterial disease.   When he was growing up, such space was called a “vestibule,” a term he finds much less infectious-sounding and much more fun to say.
• Teenagers don’t “roll” yards anymore — they “TP” them.
• Your compiler confesses to not having had teenagers in the house for well over a decade, which may largely explain his next missed phrase, but he hasn’t heard in ages of anyone “going steady” like kids used to.
• What ever happened to eating cornbread crumbled in either a glass of sweet milk or buttermilk for Sunday supper?   Lots of families, including your compiler’s, ate it every week.   Nobody seems to do it anymore, but your compiler avers that hot cornbread crumbled in a glass, covered with sweet milk, and eaten with a spoon will heal the sick and near-about raise the dead.
• And finally, there’s the annual vs. yearbook question, with which we introduced this column.

     Your compiler really does not want to be a crusty old curmudgeon complaining about everything that’s new-fangled about life, even though must of us would probably confess to preferring whining over counting one’s blessings, at least on occasion.  All he wants to do, really, is to pause in remembrance of some lovely old ways we used to say and do things.   

     That…and get folks to quit pronouncing “syrup” with a long “e,” dadgummit!

1. 

   Jean Ward

   To me, meals continue to be breakfast, dinner, and supper. And a big “yes!” to cornbread…especially when fried in bacon grease.