By Erin McKean
Dictionary of American Regional English, Vol. V: Sl-Z
Edited by Joan Houston Hall
Harvard, 1,244 pages, $85
If you've been puzzled by what your Texan (or Oklahoman) friends mean by a tin horn, or baffled by whether strubbly hair is a new style popular in Pennsylvania, or left wondering if you should be offended when a Mainer calls you a tunklehead, the fifth and final volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is here to set you straight. From it you'll learn that a tin horn is a metal culvert, that strubbly hair is untidy or straggly, and that tunklehead is not a term of endearment. (click below to read more)
DARE began at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1963. Frederic Gomes Cassidy, the chief editor, spent the first few years of the project putting together 1,847 questions about daily life, covering more than 40 topics, such as weather, foods, honesty and dishonesty, exclamations, parts of the body, tobacco and liquor, and family relationships.
The DARE questionnaire was a triumph of what William Safire called "the whatdyacallit question"—such as, "What do you call the time in the early morning before the sun comes into sight?" (before-day in parts of the South, peep of day in places including Maryland and Rhode Island). There was also what might be termed "the howdyasayit question," such as: "In a game of tag, if a player wants to rest, what does he call out so that he can't be tagged?" (Time out in most of the country east of the Mississippi, but king's ex west of the Mississippi.)
In 1965, the questionnaire was complete, and 80 fieldworkers (mostly graduate students) set out in converted Dodge vans nicknamed "word wagons" to interview 2,777 people in 1,002 communities from Maine to Hawaii. Most of the interviewees were also recorded reading aloud and engaging in informal conversation; the resulting tapes, parts of which are available online, are a wonderful oral history of mid-20th-century American daily life.
Administering all the questionnaires took six years, with individual interviews often taking several days. The next stage was sorting out the 2.3 million answers to create more than 60,000 entries ranging from a (an entry that takes up a page and a half, covering its use both as an indefinite article and as part of Southern constructions such asa-purpose for "on purpose") to the final one, zydeco. To complement the field work, DARE editors collected textual citations from local newspapers, regional novels and books, diaries, menus, and even billboards, dating from colonial times to the present day (all the way up to 2011, in the case of Volume V).
Cassidy, who would rally his staff with the cry "On to Z!", had hoped to publish the first volume (A-C) in time for the 1976 bicentennial, but it didn't appear until 1985. Subsequent volumes were published in 1991 (D-H), 1996 (I-O) and 2001 (P-Sk), and all are currently available from Harvard University Press. After Cassidy died in 2000—"On to Z!" is carved on his tombstone—the current chief editor, Joan Houston Hall, took over.
DARE is full of words that are just fun to say, such as swing-dingle ("a shoulder yoke for carrying a pair of buckets"); yagger, a Kentucky word meaning to talk angrily or (of an animal) to growl; and suffancified ("satisfied," usually in the joke phrase "my sufficiency is suffancified," used when politely declining more food at a meal).
The volume gives us such poetic constructions as "twice out of sight," a phrase used in the Appalachians to talk about things that are "at the back end of beyond"; "speak the word with the bark on it" or tell the "unvarnished truth" (parts of Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma); and "find a tee-hee's nest with a ha-ha's egg in it," used mostly in the Midwest to mean "laughing uncontrollably."
We also find such evocative words as splatterdab (a pancake), thief stick (a ruler used to estimate standing timber) and third-shift mosquito (a lightning bug). DARE includes literary regional words, such as thriblet (used by Faulkner to mean "triplet") and mountain grill (used by Thomas Wolfe to mean "hillbilly"), as well as plenty of words that get right to the point with what we think of as American directness: A stomach-robber is a bad cook; a spit harp is a harmonica; someone who is whiffle-minded is "fickle or vacillating"; and something that is yaw-ways is at an angle or askew.
DARE reflects our history of immigration (as well as slavery), with words such as the Pennsylvania German wunnerfitz ("a nosy person") and swonger, which means "to be proud" or "to strut" and comes from Gullah, a creole language spoken by African-Americans on the Sea Islands and in the coastal Southeast. Mirroring the variety of American terrain, DARE is also a treasure-trove for naturalists amateur and professional, with painstaking attention paid to regional names for plants, fish, bugs and animals. The names beginning with "yellow" alone take up 21 pages, including an entry for yellowwood, which can refer to the prickly ash, the Osage orange, the tulip tree, Carolina buckthorn, Florida boxwood and cascara, among others.
It's not just the words that reward browsing but the citations too: At tennie-pump (tennis shoe), we find this quote from a blog entry: "I once had a load of 6,000 Converse high tops stolen off my yard. Feds found the culprits in 3 days, dancing around a bonfire in the woods, a mountain of tenny-pumps nearby." (That's a whole story arc for a police show right there.)
But the true value of DARE is as a record of the down-home speech of Americans, reflecting quotidian concerns: children's games, plants and animals, good things to eat and ways to talk about our neighbors—the kinds of things too easily forgotten. Volume V offers such glimpses of Americana as white lampblack (a nonexistent item of the sort that newbies being hazed are asked to fetch; others include the classic left-handed monkey wrench, strap oil, wheelbarrow seed and a round square) and spot dances (where the couple closest to a marked spot on the floor when the music stops wins a prize). Although we often assume that "country practices" have fallen by the wayside under the onslaught of pop culture, DARE provides evidence for many terms not only of past use but of continued currency.
Though the project has reached Z safely, the work isn't quite done: The editors are working on a sixth volume of supplementary materials, including thesaurus-style lists (including 364 words for being "thoroughly drunk") and maps showing how such synonyms are distributed across the country. In addition, planning is under way both for return visits to the original communities and for online updates to the original survey. The entire project is expected to be available online in September 2013. With the alphabetical sequence complete, the project's rallying cry is no longer "On to Z!" but, in an allusion to the title of a Dr. Seuss book, "On beyond Zebra!"
—Ms. McKean is the founder of Wordnik, an online dictionary focusing on how words are used today, and a member of DARE's advisory Board of Visitors.
No comments:
Post a Comment