Our dialect reflects life wrested from the mud, clay, and stone of wet delta land and the need to be heard over vast stretches of fields. Not surprising then that the sounds of Toisanese syllables come wrapped up like clods of dirt embedded with stones and held together by the long, sinewy grasses used for cooking. Sentences explode out of the mouth like a mortar barrage, with consonants, vowels, all the tones meshed into a tight, barbed clump of earthy linguistics. Toisanese can arc over rice paddies, penetrate a flock of noisy geese, cut through a stand of bamboo trees, and curve around a hill. As the sentence lands, the remaining barbs of sound hook your eardrum so you know that, indeed, you are being addressed and the reasons why.

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In the land of Toisan, there were no excuses for failure. There could only be survival, and thus Toisanese evolved to guarantee survival. A nuance-free language whose meanings were harsh, crudely, and loudly clear--where layered linguistics of hidden meanings has no place--served its speakers well.

In contrast, Big City Cantonese was melodic, like a stanza of music in its seven tones and spoken at a normal volume. The one-upmanship of city sophistication propelled its colloquialisms. It was the language of overly clever merchants and the prickly doubleentendres of the social elite.  Big City Cantonese was spoken in urbane quarters, with the speakers wearing clean, fashionable clothes and using elegant manners. Its basis was politeness masking a withering wit, preferably while eloquently describing the subtle fragrances of this year's harvest of that  rare tea handpicked by monkeys from misty high cliffs.

But even Big City Cantonese appreciated that the earsplitting, spitty Toisanese attained its oratorical finest reach when downright rude and disdainful to the bones of your family and especially your ancestors. It soared even higher when salty and sexually graphic. You know you were told off when you were tongue-lashed in Toisanese.