Y’all, I’m fixin’ to have a come-apart. I’d heard about yokels who teach people how to speak without a Southern accent, but I didn’t know it was becoming downright trendy to want to “talk right,” i.e., like you ain’t from these parts.

Don’t that jar your preserves?

A true Southern accent, as all of us know, is a thing of beauty, like a honeysuckle-scented breeze against your ear. But to some— i.e., the nuts in Hollywood—it is a country-sounding twang or an exaggerated whine that grates on your nerves like the sound of a leaf blower’s motor outside your bedroom window at 2 a.m.

Note to movie-types: Scarlett and Rhett are not real.

Neither are their accents.

We Southerners have known it for years — it’s about time you did.

I know; it’s a shocker.

And while you’re already off balance, I’ll go ahead and give you the rest: We don’t live on plantations, or ask the name of your great-grandaddy’s grandaddy, and, with the exception of a few re-enacters, none of us refer to it as “the War of Northern Aggression.”

I have never sat on a chay-uh or drunk wah-tuh.

I don’t know the words to “Dixie.”

Not the tiniest sip of a mint julep has ever passed my lips, and, take a deep breath, some of us have been to college.

I myself am the recipient of hi-yah eje-macayshun.

The desire for that educated polish, it seems, is the reason these “How to Lose Your Southern Accent” courses are cropping up. Several professors of such courses stated that Southern accents make people seem less educated and refined. It’s difficult to be taken seriously or get a job if you speak “Southern,” they say.

Well, butter me and call me a biscuit.

Many course descriptions also state they teach actors how to lose their accents so they can get more jobs.

Mebbe they should oughta spend their time teaching correct Southern accents so we don’t have to cringe when we watch “Steel Magnolias,” “Forrest Gump,” or any movie made from a John Grisham novel.

That is why Lucas Black is my hero. Lucas, who is from Speake, is a young actor who has had much success without changing his accent. It was his very real northern Alabama accent that got him his first film part (in Kevin Costner’s “The War”) and he’s managed to find plenty of roles since, including the young boy in Billy Bob Thornton’s acclaimed “Sling Blade.” More recently, he starred in “Friday Night Lights,” and “The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift.”

So far, he hasn’t sold out. He turned down a part in “The Horse Whisperer” because the producers wanted him to learn to speak without his accent.

Black has said he doesn’t want to change who he is.

He must not have seen, or cared about, the results of a 1999 study by Michigan State University professor Dennis Preston, in which 150 Michigan residents were asked to rank the “correctness” of English spoken in all 50 states. The South ranked the lowest, with Alabama at the bottom of the list.

Hmmm. Reckon if we polled 150 Alabamians, they might think people from Dee-troyt talk funny?

One professor of such a course said some Southern accents are so strong an interpreter is needed to translate. Yet he could understand Nicholas Cage in “Con Air?”

Yet another professor and linguistic expert, Patricia Cukor-Avila with the University of North Texas, said people outside the South associate the Southern accent with laziness, ignorance and backward thinking, which has given us “linguistic insecurity.”

Do what?

Say who?

If only I’d known. I could have started a fund, or at least a support group for Southerners Insecure about Linguistics and Language, Y’all (or SILLY).

Well, I’m getting myself shut of all this rigamarole. It makes me no nevermind if some snooty people think I don’t talk right.

They cain’t hep it if’n their mamas didn’t raise them right.

Bless their hearts.