Well now, Guest the South, I reckon you are probably correct. I heard my Grandparents, who were rural Kentuckians born before 1900, use lots of colorful expressions. These expressions were less common with my parents, and I suppose I hardly hear or use them nowadays. So, yeah, the old rural folks used more of this language than Southerners do today. I reckon you could say it's due to education and higher breeding, but I think it's got more to do with the pervasive force of television and other mass popular culture, which has given us all a more uniform and far less interesting way of speaking, in my opinion.

You may see such a change as a positive trend. I however think we are losing something of our heritage, and I think this thread is a small attempt to preserve the way these folks spoke, and not an attempt to picture them as ignorant or backwards.