CC >> Welcome, everyone, to
Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen, and I work here
at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on
behalf of those folks and our other sponsors, Wisconsin Public
Television, the UW Madison Science Alliance, and PLATO,
thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight's a pretty special night.
I want to start with a little story.
When I was a young boy growing up in Dixon, Illinois, on
occasion my mom and dad would drive us up to Racine,
Wisconsin, to visit Grandpa and Grandma Zinnen and my cousins,
the Brandts and the Banaszaks. And one of the things I noticed
about the Brandts and the Banaszaks was they talked a
little different than we did there in Dixon.
They pronounced things a little differently.
For example, the lake here on the north side of our campus
they would pronounce Lake Mendota.
And I would just call it Lake Mendota.
But the most impressive thing was that when we'd be playing
there in Humble Park and we'd get thirsty, I would run to the
water fountain, and they would run to the bubbler.
[LAUGHTER] So if anybody else has t-shirts
on today with the bubbler, now's the time.
Tonight, I'm delighted to be able to introduce to you Joan
Houston Hall. Having lived in Ohio,
California, Idaho, Georgia, Oregon, Maine, and Wisconsin,
Joan is ideally suited to her task of recording regional
variation in American English. Her PhD is from Emory University
where she studied the speech of rural southeast Georgia, and she
has been on the staff of the Dictionary of American Regional
English here at UW Madison since 1975.
She became chief editor in 2000 following the death of founding
editor Frederic G Cassidy. Dr. Hall has been president of
the American Dialect Society and of the Dictionary Society of
North America. And she has served on advisory
boards for Oxford University Press, National Public Radio's
"A Way With Words," and the journals American Speech, the
Journal of Linguistics, and Verbatim.
Please join me in welcoming Joan Houston Hall to Wednesday Nite
at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]
Well, thank you for coming. I'm delighted to be here.
Does everyone have two pages of the handout?
If you don't, please raise your hand, and maybe Tom can help
you. This is a pretty excited time
for DARE. Our official publication date
for volume five was March 20th, and we've had a real blitz of
publicity that's been quite exciting.
For years before his death in 2000, Frederic Cassidy had...
Is this not working?
Is this better? Okay.
For years before his death in 2000, Frederic Cassidy had as
his motto: On to Z. [LAUGHTER]
Well, now we've reached Z but we're not finished so we need
a new motto. And with Dr. Seuss we're now
saying on beyond Zebra. [LAUGHTER]
Well, we've been savoring the publicity, and we recognized for
a long time that there would be quite a blitz of it so we tried
to anticipate the kinds of questions that we knew
would happen. The main one we expected was: is
American English becoming homogenized because we're such a
mobile population and because of the media that are across the
country that everyone sees? Well, before I try to answer
that, I'd like to just let you know what DARE is about.
So I'll briefly explain what it is, why it was done, and how it
was done, and then we'll get to that question.
Way back in 1889, the American Dialect Society was founded with
the idea that they would put together a dictionary of
American dialect that would be complementary to the English
dialect dictionary that was being done at that same time.
But they knew that this country is so much bigger than England
that it would take a lot of preparatory work.
So they began by founding a journal called Dialect Notes,
and the members of the society would make lists every time they
went to a different part of the country.
If they went on vacation to the Ozarks, they would listen
carefully and write down everything that was different.
And for years they published these lists, very interesting
lists, but they didn't do anything systematic toward
getting a diction of the whole country.
So decades went by and in the late 1940s, Fred Cassidy, who
was in the English Department here, he had come here in 1939,
got a little impatient. So he decided to use Wisconsin
as a pilot study. He chose 50 communities across
the state, found two people in each of those communities who
would be willing to answer the questions in a huge
questionnaire. He had developed
this questionnaire based on all of those lists that had been
published. About 1800 questions having to
do with neutral things like time and weather and food and
clothing, farming and household items, and going on to more
sensitive items like religion and health and honesty and
school and all sorts of things that we talk about in our daily
lives. He got those people in 50
communities in Wisconsin to answer all these questions on
mailed questionnaire tablets. He would send a new one each
week. And when they were all turned
in, he looked at the answers and tossed out questions if there
was no variation or if people didn't seem to understand it and
then wrote up the results. He gave a talk to the society,
and people were appreciative. They said, "Good job, Fred."
But nothing happened. So another decade went by and he
got a little more impatient and gave a talk at the society's
annual meeting called The American Dialect Society
Dictionary: How Soon? This time, his colleagues said
nice job, Fred, only they went back to their executive council
and decided that he would be the person to do it, so they
appointed him as chief editor and told him to get started.
So getting started was a pretty big deal.
He had to select a thousand communities across the country
that would be representative of the demographics as of the 1960
census. Then he had to collect about 80
fieldworkers, mostly graduate students, who would come here to
Madison and be trained in phonetic transcription so that
they all did it the same way. It was important not only to
collect words, but to note how people said them.
So if somebody said radiator rather than radiator, that was
important to note. So, once those people were
trained, they were sent to it turned out to be 1,002
communities. He had two extra thinking that a
couple might not work, but they all worked.
So we have 1,002 communities. The fieldworkers had to go to
their assigned communities totally cold.
They had to go in and find people who had been born there,
had lived there all their lives, and preferably had parents and
grandparents from that same community.
If you remember, this was the late '60s.
Five of the fieldworkers went in what we called "word wagons,"
primitive camper vehicles that had a fold-out bed, a tiny sink,
a tiny stove, but emblazoned on the side was University of
Wisconsin-Madison. So you can imagine that when
they went to Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia it could
be difficult. So they learned very quickly
that the best thing to do on arriving at a new community was
to check in with the local sheriff or the police department
and explain what they were doing, make sure that people
understood they were there for a legitimate purpose, and also use
that sheriff or police officer to get good leads for people in
the community. Well, if one person did the
whole questionnaire, it took most of a week.
So very often it was necessary to find several people who would
divvy up the questionnaire. One person might say, well, I
don't know anything about hunting and fishing, but talk to
Mr. Brown down the road, he'll do that.
But in each case we knew the details of age, sex, race,
community type, and amount of education.
So not only could be map where the words were collected, but we
could also look at the social statistics and see whether a
word seemed to be disproportionately frequent
among any of those groups. Well, all of this took about six
years, from 1965 to the end of 1970.
While it was being done, there was another large group of
people, often members of the American Dialect Society, who
volunteered to read, to read widely, to read newspapers and
diaries and histories and novels and government documents and
anything they could get their hands on that would have words
that varied from one part of the country to another.
So, at the same time that data were being collected, citations
were being collected from all sorts of written materials.
So like the Oxford English Dictionary, DARE is a historical
dictionary, and we try to use the earliest known citation of
every headword, as many other quotations as necessary to show
when and where it was used, and then some recent ones also.
So the data that we collected between 1965 and 1970 make a
wonderful snapshot of mid-20th century American speech, but
that's not the whole picture. We give the preceding history
and the following history as well.
So, now that we've reached Z, the question is: are American
English dialects dying out? The question, of course, has
come up before. A couple of years ago there was
an AP article about DARE that got a lot of play, and it was
reprinted all over the country and in Britain, and there were
lots of radio and TV spots about it, and there were also lots of
spinoff articles in local newspapers reacting to the
article in which journalists took the opportunity to
celebrate whatever local words were near and dear to the hearts
of their own readers. And these were fun to see
because they reinforced the point that regional terms are,
indeed, still used, recognized, and cherished.
But one article caught me by surprise.
It was called Words That Fail the Test of Time.
It appeared in the Financial Times of London, but it was
written by an American, Christopher Caldwell.
I'd like to quote some of his remarks to you as we explore
whether dialects really are being homogenized.
Caldwell wrote, This book is beloved of columnists and
autodidacts. William Sapphire told a reporter
that DARE shows the richness and diversity of our language.
But is this really true? Is American English really that
rich and diverse? What diversity it has is
certainly on prominent display, but that is only because
American English has been standardized by mass media and
the bureaucratization of working life.
It is, thus, if you measure it on a per speaker or a per acre
basis, remarkably undiverse. It is astonishingly dialect
free. Then a bit later he says, A
good many of the curiosities that DARE lays out are not
really dialectal. They're words that immigrants
used in their transition out of one language in into another.
What could be less interesting than to learn that people in the
Swedish-settled areas of the Upper Midwest use lutefisk to
mean dried fish. This is a word that will either
disappear or be thoroughly integrated into mainstream
English. It is no more a sign of the
richness and diversity of American English than words such
as spaghetti or wiener schnitzel.
Well, Christopher Caldwell never lived in Minnesota or Wisconsin.
[LAUGHTER] Or even traveled
these areas in the weeks before Christmas when the local
churches have their lutefisk dinners.
He would recognize that lutefisk is not only a very nice
regionalism, it's also a cultural icon.
And although many more people now know about lutefisk through
Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion," the word is
distinctly unlikely ever to be thoroughly integrated into
American English, but it's equally unlikely ever to
disappear because its status as a marker of identity, not just
for people of Scandinavian descent but for Upper
Midwesterners in general, is firmly entrenched.
There's a copy of the DARE map for lutefisk on the second page
of your handout. So this is a good time for me to
mention those strange looking maps.
As the first page of your handout explains, the DARE map
has been adjusted to show population density as of the
1960 census. So rather than showing the
geographic area that you are used to seeing, the states have
been enlarged or made smaller depending on how many people
live there. So Connecticut, which is a
really small state that has a lot of people, had to be
expanded, and New Mexico, which is huge but very unpopulated,
had to be shrunk. That map shows where lutefisk
was given an answer to two questions.
One of them asked about dishes with meat, fish, or poultry that
people in your community would know about but other people
wouldn't, and the other one asked about foreign foods that
people in the community liked. Well, as you can see, the dots
cluster in the Upper Midwest in the north central states,
especially Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the term is
rarely found elsewhere. So, indeed, it is a regional
term. Caldwell went on to explain that
the fieldwork for DARE was done between 1965 and 1970 and that
there was an emphasis on interviewing older people, and
that's true. The idea was to interview people
of old, middle-aged, and young categories but to concentrate on
the old, which meant over 60 which does not feel old anymore.
[LAUGHTER] The idea being that in 1965 if
you were talking to an 85-year-old person, that person
would have seen tremendous changes in our society.
Not just things like automobiles and telephones and radio, but
terrific changes in all kinds of agriculture.
The words that they had for plows and derricks and harnesses
and wagons were not going to be known by the next generation
down. So it was really important to
collect those and preserve them. So anyway, Caldwell goes on to
say: This backward focus is in an implicit admission that in
the television age, and even more in the internet age, quirks
of language melt away like butter on a stove.
DARE might more accurately be called a historical dictionary.
Its main use will be for clarifying obscure references in
old oral histories. Well, yes.
DARE is a historical dictionary, and one of its purposes was to
record those words that were going out of use.
But Caldwell seems to have a skewed notion of what a
historical dictionary does. There's no attempt to eschew the
contemporary in a historical dictionary, and there aren't any
cutoff dates that allow only for inclusion of funny old stuff.
When volume five of DARE was published of March of this year,
there were quotations from 2011 as well as from 1700, not to
mention all the years in between.
As for words melting away like butter on a stove because of the
influence of television and the internet, not exactly.
Do some words go out of use over time?
Of course. Do some local terms get
supplanted by commercial terms that have gained nationwide
dominance? Yes.
Well, let's take a look at a few examples.
One of the questions in the DARE questionnaire was: when eggs are
taken out of the shells and cooked in boiling water, you'd
call them? >> [INAUDIBLE]
Poached eggs. And most of our DARE informants
did. But we also had examples of
pouched eggs, a nice folk etymology; porched eggs, chiefly
in the south and south midland; and proached eggs, chiefly among
African Americans. But we also discovered that in
New England, poached eggs were very often called dropped eggs.
You break the shell and drop the egg into the boiling water.
Well, you can see on your handout that this was not only a
really nice geographical distribution but it had an
interesting social distribution as well.
Of the 41 people who offered this term for a poached egg, 33
were over 60 at the time of the fieldwork in the mid-1960s.
So, if we were to go back today, I think it's highly unlikely
that we would find in the examples of dropped eggs.
We don't know why some words go out of use.
Perhaps at that time a new emphasis on sophisticated
cooking spurred by the publication of Mastering the Art
of French Cooking might have made a difference, might have
made homely objects like dropped eggs seem very unsophisticated.
Restaurants could have stopped calling them dropped eggs.
Sometimes we just never know. Words do go out of use even if
the thing itself is still part of the culture.
Well, at another point in the DARE questionnaire, we asked two
questions. One of them had to do with those
troughs on the edge of a roof that catch the rainwater and
take it over to the second question, the thing that took it
to the ground. So you might call the first
one... >> Gutters.
Gutters or... >> Eaves.
Eaves troughs. >> Eave spouts.
Eave spouts. And this one, a downspout or...
Downspout. >> Mostly a downspout.
Well, we found the same thing. Nice concentrations of eave
spouts, eaves troughs, or troughts or troughs, those are
hard to say, or rain spouts, spouting, and water troughs.
But we also had six examples of leaders.
They lead the water over to the downspout, and the downspout
itself was also called leader or leader pipe.
There were 24 examples of these. So we mapped them, and as you
can see on your handout, there's a really nice distribution.
With one stray exception in Iowa, all the responses are
southeastern New York, northern New Jersey, eastern
Pennsylvania, or a few places in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
And the written quotes that we found supported that
distribution. But as was true with dropped
egg, in the case of leader, 26 out of 30 people were old at the
time of the fieldwork. So, again, we probably wouldn't
find it if we were to go back today and ask the same question,
but here it's easier to understand why that would
happen. A look at the trade magazines
shows that by 1970 gutters had become the standard term in
publications for carpenters, for roofers, for their suppliers,
and when that kind of standardization happens, the
local terms have a really tough time holding their ground.
Similarly, when the DARE fieldworkers asked that question
about foods that people in your community like but other people
might not know about, we had a great map for, on your handout,
enchilada. You can see that chiefly
southwestern distribution. But, of course today, everyone
knows enchilada, and it's highly likely because of the rise in
fast food restaurants and the spread of chains.
So, if examples like these were the norm, it wouldn't be
unreasonable for people to think that American English is
becoming homogenized and that dialects are on their way out.
But what about all the other words that we use in our
day-to-day interactions with families, friends, and others in
our communities? These aren't the kinds of words
that are affected by our exposure to television or the
internet. What do we call our
grandparents, for instance? Are they grandma and grandpa?
Granny and grampy? Nana and pappy?
Papa? Memaw and papaw?
Mormor and morfar? Oma and opa?
Or, like Barack Obama, do we call our grandmother toot, short
for the Hawaiian tutu? Or what do children say if
they're going to play hookey? Do they bag school as kids did
in Pennsylvania and New Jersey? Bum school, as in Michigan and
Illinois? Ditch, as in California?
Hook school, as in Maryland? Lay out, as in the southeast?
Or slough, as they do in Utah. If they play a children's game
involving sitting in a circle and having somebody go around
the outside tapping the players on the head, is it Duck, Duck,
Goose? In most of the inland north it
is. But if you're from Minnesota,
you'll swear to the death that it is not Duck, Duck, Goose, it
is, instead, anybody? >> Duck, Duck, Gray Duck.
Duck, Duck, Gray Duck. That's a very Minnesota terms.
[LAUGHTER] If a guest spends the
night and there's no spare bedroom, in the south you'll put
a pallet or a Baptist pallet or a Methodist pallet on the floor,
but if you're from New England, you're likely to put a shakedown
on the floor. And if your children spend the
night with friends, they could go to a slumber party, but they
might, instead, call it a sleepover or a spend the night.
These are the kinds of words that we use casually and
unselfconsciously and that we usually assume are used by
everybody else. So the notion of the continued
existence of local dialects in America is not that when we
travel to other parts of the country we won't be able to
communicate, that we won't understand other people.
In most cases, we communicate very clearly.
But we are often surprised and delighted to discover that
differences permeate the language of our everyday
conversation. To give you some examples, let
me call on my own experience in having moved around the country
a lot. I moved to Wisconsin in 1975
after having lived in Ohio, California, Idaho, Georgia,
Oregon, and Maine. In all those places I'd been
aware of differences in vocabulary and pronunciation,
especially, of course, in the south and the northeast.
But somehow I naively thought that all of those experiences
would have made Wisconsin very easy.
No problem, I thought. Shortly after I arrived in
Madison, I saw a big sign out in front of the Memorial Union that
said, I thought, "brats on the terrace."
[LAUGHTER] Why, I thought, would
they advertise unruly little children out on the terrace, and
what was the terrace? My colleagues could not believe
that I didn't know what a brat was.
And it didn't take long before I learned that brats are not just
pork sausages but that in Wisconsin they can also be pork
and beef, chicken and apple, turkey and spinach, and even
tofu and curry. And some places have so many
varieties they advertise the brat of the week.
Well, I also learned that the terrace is that lovely place
behind the Memorial Union on the banks of Lake Mendota, but the
terrace in Madison, officially anyway, is also that strip of
grass between the sidewalk and the street.
The city will tell you to put your garbage can out on the
terrace on Thursday morning. I didn't have a name for that at
all because they didn't have such things where I grew up.
But at DARE I soon learned that that's one of the most
productive of the questions we asked.
There are dozens of names for that.
You can probably suggest others. >> Tree lawn.
Tree lawn. >> Curb lawn.
Curb lawn. Parking, parking strip, parkway,
berm, boulevard, tree box, tree belt, swail, verge.
Dozens. >> [INAUDIBLE]
We'll get to that. Not long after my introduction
to brats, a colleague said that she was going out to get some
bakery and would I like some. I thought, huh, I thought a
bakery was a building where you bought sweet things, not the
sweet things themselves. And other things that were new
to me were things like stop and goes for traffic lights, squeaky
cheese, I didn't even know what cheese curds were, Spanish
hamburger for a sloppy Joe, flowage for the lake that's
created by damming up a river or a stream, budge in the sense to
cut in line. Kids will say no budging, and
that's a very southern Wisconsin thing.
Almost all of our data shows that it's southern Wisconsin and
a tiny little part of northern Illinois.
And there are also things like Sheepshead and horse a piece,
all of which are very popular here but were totally unknown to
me. And of course, where's the
nearest bubbler? I also found that it wasn't just
the vocabulary that could be puzzling.
Sometimes little grammatical bits intruded as well.
My office manager said once after she had loaned me her
stapler and had seen me using it, "Are you using the stapler
yet?" It took me a bit to understand
that she was using yet where I would use still, and then she
said, "Would you pass me the paper clip once?"
[LAUGHTER] I thought, gee, I'd
be happy to do it three or four times.
[LAUGHTER] And things like can you borrow
me five dollars, or let's go by John's for dinner, when
you're not going to go by John's but you're going to stop
and have dinner. And, of course, the common
question, I'm going to the store, want to come with?
It turns out that this last one is characteristic not just of
German-speaking people but of people who have Dutch, Danish,
Norwegian, Swedish, and Yiddish backgrounds as well.
And then, of course, there's also the Norwegian way of
expressing distaste as in, ew, that's ishy, as opposed to icky.
Both Wisconsin and Minnesota are ishy places, at least according
to our data. And the wonderful Norwegian
phrase uff-da, which can fill a hundred gaps.
Well, I suspect that Christopher Caldwell would be surprised to
discover just how much of the everyday vocabulary of people in
the Midwest and other regions as well he was unfamiliar with, but
they aren't the kinds of words that he would hear on the
television in the airport at Minneapolis or Denver or Austin
or Boston or Baltimore. He would only run into them if
he stayed long enough to go home with you and share a meal and
meet your family. And these kinds of words are not
going to disappear just because a journalist from the northeast
has never heard of them. But enough of Caldwell.
I think this is good evidence to suggest that the differences
that still exist from one dialect to another as well as
the words that formally existed in one place or another justify
the exercise of collecting them and recording them.
But, if the scholarly effort were not justifiable in and of
itself, there would still be some very tangible and practical
uses for this project that might convince even the most skeptical
of our critics. So, who needs DARE?
In talking about the people who use DARE, I like to start first
with librarians because we knew that they would be prime users
of this. And we know it's true when we
get letters such as this one from a librarian in Tennessee
who said: DARE has come to my rescue on numerous occasions
when I had no idea that an expression or word was regional.
A good example: a library patron wanted information on dry land
fish. We looked in every fish book we
could think of to no avail. As the patron kept repeating
that this fish grew in the woods, and I couldn't think of
any fish that would grow in the woods, I got to wondering if it
was a regional expression, and of course it was.
A dry land fish is a mushroom. [LAUGHTER]
And it's not surprising that that letter came from Tennessee
because 15 of 16 of our examples of dry land fish came from
either Kentucky or Tennessee.
Well, librarians are expectable users of a reference tool like a
dictionary. What about this letter from a
man named Roger Shy who was a linguist at Georgetown
University, and then retired to Missoula, Montana, where he set
up a business as a forensic linguist.
When he was at Georgetown, he had a student who was also
working at the FBI, and he says: This student got me involved in
the Unabomber case, and I analyzed all of the threat
letters and then the manifesto before it was made public.
Using language clues of region, age, race, gender, education
level, religious background, and social status, I produced a
linguistic profile that differed considerably from the one that
the FBI profilers had made. I found him to be from the
Chicago area but who lived for some part of his life in
northern California, well educated, as I put it, probably
with a doctorate but not in the social sciences or humanities,
about 50 years old, male, white or well-educated black, with
some religious background that he probably no longer practiced.
The FBI profile, on the other hand, had him as from the coast,
young, male, white, relatively uneducated, and a tradesman.
Well, we remember, don't we. Roger goes on to say: I
describe this work to point out the value of DARE as a tool that
I use in doing this profiling. I suspect it may not have
occurred to anyone that law enforcement investigation is
aided by reference tools such as DARE.
I keep my three volumes of DARE handy to my desk, along with
unabridged dictionaries, encyclopedias, dialect atlases,
and other important references. I find it invaluable.
Needless to say, it would be even more valuable if it went
beyond the letter O. [LAUGHTER]
Well, now he has all the way to Z.
Well, Roger has told us of other cases as well in which he's been
able to eliminate suspects from a police list or narrow in on a
criminal party by checking DARE for the distributions of words
that turn up in threat letters and ransom notes.
For instance, one pencil scrawled ransom note left at the
doorstep of the parents of an abducted child said this: Do
you ever want to see your precious little girl again?
Put $10,000 cash in a diaper bag.
Put it in a green trash can on the devil strip at the corner of
18th and Carlson. Don't bring anybody along.
No cops!! Two exclamation points.
Come alone! Exclamation point.
I'll be watching you all the time.
Anyone with you, deal is off and daughter is dead!!!
Three exclamation points. Well, there are a number of
interesting things about the note, and one is that the writer
spelled trash can K-A-N. He spelled cops K-O-P-S, and he
spelled daughter D-A-U-T-T-E-R. But he correctly spelled
precious, he didn't forget the A in diaper, he spelled watching
right, and except for those exclamation points, the
punctuation was purely standard. So what that suggested to Roger
was that the writer was faking his educational background and
that a fairly educated person was probably dumbing down for
the purposes of this note. But what really caught his eye
was the sentence "put it in the green trash can on the devil
strip at the corner of 18th and Carlson."
The devil strip? Where can he find out about
that? It's not in the Oxford English
Dictionary, it's not in Webster's Third New
International, it's not in the American Heritage or Webster's
New World or any other standard dictionary of American English,
but it is in the Dictionary of American Regional English.
And what DARE told him is that the devil strip is that strip of
grass between the sidewalk and the street, the terrace, the
verge, the swail, the tree box, the tree line, whatever.
But the devil strip is used in a very circumscribed area.
It's used almost solely in the the area outlined by the
triangle of Youngstown, Cleveland, and Akron, Ohio.
As it happened, on the police suspect list there was one
relatively well-educated man from Akron, and when he was
confronted with the linguistic as well as the other evidence,
he confessed and the child was saved.
So we were really thrilled to know that the work we had done
could contribute in such a tangible way to that kind of
problem solving.
So law enforcement is a great example of a field that we had
not anticipated as benefiting from our work, but think, also,
of people like physicians. Suppose you had grown up here in
Madison, gone to West High, then gone to the UW, and had stayed
here for medical school. What happens then if you're
posted for your internship in rural northern Maine or southern
Appalachia or western New Mexico?
How do you respond when your first patient says, "Doc, I've
been rifting and I got jags in my leaders."
[LAUGHTER] "I've got dew poison, the
ground itch. I've got pip jennies, sore
kernels, leaders, salt --." What do you do?
If you have DARE, you can look up these regional and folk and
archaic terms for ailments and diseases and at least know what
questions to ask next. The example of the "I've been
rifting and I've got jags in my leaders" is from a doctor who
grew up in Maine and who was posted first in western
Pennsylvania. And he was totally nonplussed.
Well, it turns out that rift, meaning to belch or to burp, is
a very western Pennsylvania term, so it was logical for him
to encounter it there but who knew?
Not many people outside that area.
And to have jags in the leaders means to have sharp pains in the
tendons, particularly the ones in the front of your neck.
Well, DARE has also proved to be surprisingly useful in the
fields of psychiatry and geriatrics.
About 10 years ago we got a telephone call from a
psychiatrist at the University of Chicago, and he wanted to
know what we could tell him about the terms false face, Tom
walkers, harp, and mouth organ. Well, we could tell him that
false face, or a mask kind of like a Halloween mask, is more
British than American, but when it's used in this country it's
usually in the south. Tom walkers was easier because
one of the questions on our questionnaire was what do you
call those long poles with feet on them that kids walk around on
to make themselves tall? You'd say...
Stilts. >> Stilts.
Most people in the country do. But we have a beautiful map
showing that in the south and south midland, those are
commonly called Tom walkers or Tommy walkers.
And the harp and mouth organ terms came in answer to the
question about a musical instrument that you would
probably call... >> Harmonica.
A harmonica. Mouth organ is also heard in
this part of the country as well.
Well the reason that he was interested in these particular
terms is that there's a test called the Boston Naming Test
that's used to diagnose aphasia. Now, aphasia is a brain
abnormality in which people have a difficult time coming up with
words for things. So the book is 60 pages, each
with a line drawing of something that's common around the house.
A pair of scissors, a spoon, a trellis, a gate, a pair of
stilts, a mask, you get the idea.
The people who take the test are shown the picture and asked to
give a word that describes the picture.
Well, the problem is that the makers of the test developed an
answer key that admits of only one right answer.
So if you persist in using your legitimate regional words and
phrases, you're marked wrong. And that can lead to a
misdiagnosis. I mentioned this to a friend who
was a geriatric nurse and she said, oh, it doesn't stop there
because if you're diagnosed as having aphasia as a result of a
poor test, the next step is usually that you'll be given six
or eight weeks of language therapy.
So you work carefully with a therapist and at the end of that
period you're given the test again.
So if you persist in using your own legitimate regional words,
you're marked wrong again, and you're said to be not
progressing. But if you're being supported by
Medicare, your therapy will be withheld because they won't
continue unless you're progressing.
So, I thought this is something I really need to work with the
test makers on, and I tried hard to get cooperation from them for
several years. Although they first indicated a
willingness, they then stopped responding to emails and snail
mail and telephone calls. But a few years ago, just by
chance, I was at a conference in Boston where I went down to the
publishers exhibit and walked by a booth for somebody who was
publishing all sorts of language tests.
And I started chatting with the person there and she said, oh,
yes, we just bought the Boston Naming Test from its earlier
publisher. And she has agreed that the next
time they produced a new edition of it she will, indeed, work
with me to make the answer key much more amiable to regional
variation. So I'm very pleased about that.
Well, these are some of the most dramatic examples of people who
need DARE, but I can also point to the oral historian who does
indeed use it, as Christopher Caldwell suggested, to
understand words in old diaries and letters, to the historian of
science of agriculture who needs to know about the terms used to
describe tools and harnesses and wagons and derricks.
Screenwriters need it as well. One got in touch with us and
needed to know about the rent party in African American
culture. We could provide a much better
description of it than the Oxford English Dictionary could.
I give a nod to the natural science researcher who needs to
know that the bittern, that bird that stands out in the slew with
its long beak up in the air, can be called by more than 50 other
names, including such wonderfully creative ones as
barrel maker, belcher squelcher, bog pumper, bottle ca-chunk,
dunka-do, post driver, slew pumper, slug toot, thunder
pumper, and waller ka-toot. >> Sky poke.
Sky poke and shy poke, both. Good.
And, finally, to show how mainstream DARE has become, I
can report that a couple of years ago on the television quiz
show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, the question for
the $250,000 prize was: according to the Dictionary of
American Regional English, a railroad daisy is what kind of a
flower? And they gave four choices.
Anybody know railroad daisy? >> [INAUDIBLE]
Good guess. Actually, it's a black eyed
Susan. So, I hope that you'll agree
with me that DARE is loved not just by Caldwell's columnists
and autodidacts, but by scholars of many stripes and language
lovers of any stripe. And those dialect words that are
melting away like butter on the stove, don't count on it.
One of the best places to find contemporary examples of
regional terms is in chat groups and blogs on the internet where
people unselfconsciously use the words that they've grown up
with. Well, if dialects are not
disappearing but continuing to change in many ways, what's next
for DARE? Is it finished?
Far from it. We've just submitted to Harvard
University Press a sixth volume with supplementary data.
This is going to be a really useful and fascinating volume
which will come out early next year.
It will have three parts. One is a massive section of
contrastive maps. Now if you want to see where
people say hero, hoagie, sub, grinder, Cuban, torpedo, wedgie,
spuckie for that long sandwich, you can look through five
volumes of text or, in volume six, you can open it up and see
all those maps laid out on facing pages.
So this will be a wonderful tool, both for research and for
browsing. It will also have a great index
of all the regional, social, and etymological terms used in the
labels in DARE. So if you want to know what
words are characteristic of Wisconsin or Connecticut or
Alaska, you can go there and find every headword in which
that was used in the label. Or if you want to know what
words came into American English from Polish or Portuguese or
Quechua or Algonquian, you can find all of those as well.
And if you're a linguist and teaching about processes like
back formation and folk etymology and metaphysics and
metanalysis, you could just go to the OED and find those old
fusty examples, or you can go to DARE and find them from
contemporary American English. Much more interesting for
students of today. And the third part is sections
of our data summary, that is the answers to the questions that
were collected so long ago. So if you really care about the
176 names for dust balls under the bed...
[LAUGHTER] That's where you can find them.
The supplementary volume will occur early next year, and by
late next year we also hope to have a digital addition
launched. Harvard University Press is
working on it now, and the goal is to launch that in September
of 2013. So when that is live, we will
continue working with the data that we've found, we will update
the old entries using magnificent new sources of
digital data, and we will add new things that we come across.
So, although a few local terms may seem to melt like butter on
a stove, variation in American English dialects continues to
thrive and it provides grist for our lexicographic mill.
So, thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]