CC
Wednesday Nite at the Lab. >> Welcome, everyone, to
at the UW Madison Biotechnology I'm Tom ZinnCenter. I work here
I also work for UW Extension
behalf of those folks and our other sponsors, Wisconsin Public
Television, the UW Madison
thanks again for coming to Science Alliance, and PLATO,
We do this every Wednesday Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
Tonight's a pretty special night, 50 times a year.
I want to start with a little story.
When I was a young boy growing
occasion my mom and dad would updrive us up to Racine,n
Wisconsin, to visit Grandpa and Grandma Zinnen and my cousins,
the Brandts and the Banaszaks.
about the Brandts and the AnBanaszaks was they talked aed
little different than we did
They pronounced things a little thdifferently..
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
[LAUGHTER] run to the bubbler.
on today with the bubbler, So if anybody else has t-shirts
Tonight, I'm delighted to be now's the time.
Houston Hall. ableHaving lived in Ohio,Joan
California, Idaho, Georgia, Oregon, Maine, and Wisconsin,
Joan is ideally suited to her task of recording regional
variation in American English.
where she studied the speech of rural southeast Georgia, and she
has been on the staff of the
English here at UW Madison since Dictionary of American Regional
She became chief editor in 2000 following the death of founding
editor Frederic G Cassidy.
the American Dialect Society and Dr. Hall has been president of
North America. of the Dictionary Society of
boards for Oxford University And she has served on advisory
"A Way With Words," and the journals American Speech, thes
Journal of Linguistics, and Verbatim.
Please join me in welcoming Joan
at the Lab. Houston Ha[APPLAUSE]esday Nite
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.
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.
saying on beyond Zebra. And with [LAUGHTER]we're now
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
would happen. The main one we expected was: is
American English becoming homogenized because we're such a
mobile population and because of
country that everyone sees? tWell, before I try to answer
that, I'd like to just let you
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
the idea that they would put Dialect Society was founded with
American dialect that would be together a dictionary of
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
went to a different part of the would make lcountry.ry time they
If they went on vacation to the Ozarks, they would listen
carefully and write down
And for years they published everything that was different.
lists, but they didn't do thanything systematic towardg
getting a diction of the whole
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
would be willing to answer the each of those communities who
questionnaire. questions in a huge
this questionnaire based on all of those lists that had been
published.
do with neutral things like time About 1800 questions having to
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
lives. that we talk about in our daily
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
was no variation or if people didn't seem to understand it and
then wrote up the results.
and people were appreciative. HThey 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
and decided that he would be the back to their executive council
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
So if somebody said radiator people said them.
important to note. rather than radiator, that was
trained, they were sent to it Soturned out to be 1,002re
communities.
couple might not work, but they He had twoall worked.king that a
So we have 1,002 communities. The fieldworkers had to go to
their assigned communities
They had to go in and find totally cold.
had lived there all their lives, people who had been born there,
grandparents from that same and prefercommunity.arents and
If you remember, this was the late '60s.
Five of the fieldworkers went in
primitive camper vehicles that what we called "word wagons,"
a tiny stove, but emblazoned on hadthe side was University ofnk,
Wisconsin-Madison.
they went to Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia it could
be difficult. So they learned very quickly
that the best thing to do on
to check in with the local arriving at a new community was
and explain what they were sheriff or the police department
understood they were there for a doing, make sure that people
that sheriff or police officer legitimate purpose, and also use
the community. to get good leads for people in
whole questionnaire, it took Well, if one person did the
So very often it was necessary most of a week.
divvy up the questionnaire. tOne person might say, well, Ild
don't know anything about hunting and fishing, but talk to
Mr. Brown down the road, he'll
But in each case we knew the do that.
community type, and amount of details education.x, race,
So not only could be map where
could also look at the social thstatistics and see whether awe
word seemed to be disproportionately frequent
among any of those groups.
years, from 1965 to the end of Well, all of this took about six
While it was being done, there 1970.
people, often members of the was another large group of
volunteered to read, to read American Dialect Society, who
diaries and histories and novels widely, to read newspapers and
anything they could get their hands on that would have words
that varied from one part of the
So, at the same time that data country to another.
were being collected from all wesorts of written materials.ns
So like the Oxford English
dictionary, and we try to use Dthe earliest known citation ofl
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
that's not the whole picture. We give the preceding history
and the following history as
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
lots of radio and TV spots about and in Britain, and there were
spinoff articles in local it,newspapers reacting to theof
article in which journalists
celebrate whatever local words took the opportunity to
of their own readers. werAnd these were fun to seearts
because they reinforced the point that regional terms are,
indeed, still used, recognized, and cherished.
But one article caught me by
It was called Words That Fail the Test of Time.
It appeared in the Financial
written by an American, TimChristopher Caldwell.was
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
autodidacts. William beloved of columnists and
that DARE shows the richness Sapphire told a reporter
But is this really true? Is American English really that
rich and diverse? What diversity it has is
certainly on prominent
American English has been standardized by mass media beandse
the bureaucratization of working life.
It is, thus, if you measure it on a per speaker or a per acre
basis, remarkably undiverse.
free. Then a bit It is astonishingly dialect
good many of the curiosities later he says, A
really dialectal. They're thwords that immigrantsnot
used in their transition out
What could be less of one language in into another.
Swedish-settled areas of the interesting than to learn that people in the
mean dried fish. This is isk to
disappear or be thoroughly a word that will either
English. It is no intemore a sign of theream
richness and diversity of American English than words such
as spaghetti or wiener
Well, Christopher Caldwell never schnitzel.
[LAUGHTER] lived in Minnesota or Wisconsin.
these areas in the weeks before Christmas when the local
churches have their lutefisk
He would recognize that lutefisk dinners.
regionalism, it's also a is not only a very nice
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
American English, but it's thoroughly integrated into
disappear because its status as a marker of identity, not just
for people of Scandinavian
Midwesterners in general, is descent but for Upper
There's a copy of the DARE map firmly entrenched.
of your handout. for lutefisk on the second page
mention those strange looking So this is a maps.time for me to
As the first page of your handout explains, the DARE map
has been adjusted to show population density as of the
1960 census.
geographic area that you are So rather than showing the
been enlarged or made smaller usdepending on how many peoplee
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
One of them asked about dishes questions.
people in your community would with meat, fish, or poultry that
wouldn't, and the other one asked about foreign foods that
people in the community liked.
cluster in the Upper Midwest in Wethe north central states,ots
especially Minnesota and
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
that's true. interviewing older people, and
of old, middle-aged, and young The idea was to interview people
the old, which meant over 60 categories but to concentrate on
[LAUGHTER] which does not feel old anymore.
you were talking to an The idea being that in 1965 if
would have seen tremendous 85-year-old person, that person
Not just things like automobiles changes in our society.
terrific changes in all kinds of and telephones and radio, but
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.
say: This backward focus is in an implicit admission that So anyway, C in dwell goes on to
the television age, and even
m of language melt away ge, like butter on a stove.
DARE might more accurately be called a historical dictionary.
Its main use will be for
cl old oral histories. ferences Well, yes.
DARE is a historical dictionary,
record those words that were and one of its purposes was to
But Caldwell seems to have a going out of use.
historical dictionary does. There's no attempt to eschew the
contemporary in a historical
cutoff dates that allow only for dictionary, and there aren't any
When volume five of DARE was inclusion of funny old stuff.
there were quotations from 2011 puas well as from 1700, not tor,
mention all the years in
As for words melting away like between.
influence of television and the butteinternet, not exactly.f the
Do some words go out of use over
Of course. time?
supplanted by commercial terms Do some local terms get
dominance? that have gained nationwide
Well, let's take a look at a few Yes.
One of the questions in the DARE examples.
taken out of the shells and qcooked in boiling water, you'de
call them?
Poached eggs. And most of our DARE informants
did.
pouched eggs, a nice folk etymology; porched eggs, chiefly
in the south and south midland; and proached eggs, chiefly among
African Americans.
New England, poached eggs were But we also discovered that in
You break the shell and drop the very often called dropped eggs.
Well, you can see on your handout that this was not only a
really nice geographical
interesting social distribution distributas well.it had an
Of the 41 people who offered
were over 60 at the time of the thfieldwork in the mid-1960s.33
So, if we were to go back today,
that we would find in the Iexamples of dropped eggs.ly
We don't know why some words go out of use.
Perhaps at that time a new
cooking spurred by the emphasis on sophisticated
of French Cooking might have publication of Mastering the Art
made homely objects like dropped made a difference, might have
Restaurants could have stopped eggs seem very unsophisticated.
Sometimes we just never know. Words do go out of use even if
the thing itself is still part
Well, at another point in the DARE questionnaire, we asked two
questions.
troughs on the edge of a roof Onthat catch the rainwater andse
take it over to the second
to the ground. question, the thing that took it
one... So you might call the first
Gutters or... >>> Eaves..
Eaves troughs.
Eave spouts. >> Eave spouts.
Downspout. And this one, a downspout or...
Well, we found the same thing. >> Mostly a downspout.
spouts, eaves troughs, or troughts or troughs, those are
hard to say, or rain spouts,
But we also had six examples of spouting, leaders.r troughs.
They lead the water over to the downspout, and the downspout
itself was also called leader or
There were 24 examples of these. leader pipe.
can see on your handout, there's So we mapped them, and as you
With one stray exception in Iowa, all the responses are
southeastern New York, northern New Jersey, eastern
Pennsylvania, or a few places in
And the written quotes that we Connecticut and Rhode Island.
distribution. But as was true with dropped
egg, in the case of leader, 26
time of the fieldwork. out of 30 people were old at the
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
publications for carpenters, for become the standard term in
and when that kind of rstandardization happens, the
local terms have a really tough time holding their ground.
Similarly, when the DARE
about foods that people in your community like but other peoplen
might not know about, we had a
enchilada. great map for, on your handout,
southwestern distribution. You can see that chiefly
knows enchilada, and it's highly But, of course today, everyone
fast food restaurants and the likelyspread of chains.ise in
So, if examples like these were the norm, it wouldn't be
unreasonable for people to think
becoming homogenized and that dialects are on their way out.
But what about all the other
day-to-day interactions with words that we use in our
our communities? families, friends, and others in
that are affected by our These aren't the kinds of words
internet. exposWhat do we call ourr the
grandparents, for instance? Are they grandma and grandpa?
Granny and grampy?
Papa? Memaw and papaw?
Mormor and morfar?
Or, like Barack Obama, do we Oma and opa?
for the Hawaiian tutu? call our grandmother toot, short
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?
Or slough, as they do in Utah. Lay out, as in the southeast?
involving sitting in a circle and having somebody go arounde
the outside tapping the players on the head, is it Duck, Duck,
Goose?
is. But if you're from Minnesota,t
you'll swear to the death that
is, instead, anybody? it >> Duck, Duck, Gray Duck. it
Duck, Duck, Gray Duck.
[LAUGHTER] That's a very Minnesota terms.
night and there's no spare If a guest spends the
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
might, instead, call it a sleepover or a spend the night.
These are the kinds of words
unselfconsciously and that we usually assume are used by
everybody else. So the notion of the continued
existence of local dialects in
travel to other parts of the America is not that when we
communicate, that we won't country we won't be able to
In most cases, we communicate undervery clearly.eople.
But we are often surprised and
differences permeate the delighted to discover that
conversation. To give you some examples, let
me call on my own experience in having moved around the country
a lot.
after having lived in Ohio, California, Idaho, Georgia,5
Oregon, and Maine.
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
No problem, I thought. easy.
Madison, I saw a big sign out in Shortly after I arrived in
said, I thought, "brats on the front of the Memorial Union that
[LAUGHTER] terrace."
they advertise unruly little Why, I thought, would
what was the terrace? My colleagues could not believed
that I didn't know what a brat
And it didn't take long before I was.
pork sausages but that in Wisconsin they can also be pork
and beef, chicken and apple,
tofu and curry. And some places have so many
varieties they advertise the
Well, I also learned that the terrace is that lovely place
behind the Memorial Union on the
terrace in Madison, officially banks of Lake Mendota, but the
grass between the sidewalk and anyway, is also that strip of
The city will tell you to put your garbage can out on the
terrace on Thursday morning.
all because they didn't have I didn't have a name for that at
But at DARE I soon learned that sucthat's one of the mostup.
productive of the questions we
There are dozens of names for that..
You can probably suggest others.
Tree lawn. >> Tree lawn.
Curb lawn. >> Curb lawn.
berm, boulevard, tree box, tree Parkinbelt, swail, verge.arkway,
Dozens. >> [INAUDIBLE]
We'll get to that.
to brats, a colleague said that she was going out to get somen
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.
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
cut in line. a stream, budge in the sense to
that's a very southern Wisconsin Kids will say no budging, and
Almost all of our data shows thing.
a tiny little part of northern that it's southern Wisconsin and
And there are also things like Illinois.
all of which are very popular here but were totally unknown to
me. And of course, where's the
nearest bubbler?
the vocabulary that could be I also found that it wasn't just
Sometimes little grammatical puzzling.
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
said, "Would you pass me the would use still, and then she
[LAUGHTER] paper clip once?"
be happy to do it three or four I thougtimes.e, I'd
[LAUGHTER]
me five dollars, or let's go And things like can you borrow
you're not going to go by John's but you're going to stop
and have dinner.
question, I'm going to the And, of course, the common
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
expressing distaste as in, ew, also the Norwegian way of
Both Wisconsin and Minnesota are that's ishy, as opposed to icky.
to our data. ishy places, at least according
phrase uff-da, which can fill a And thehundred gaps.rwegian
Well, I suspect that Christopher
discover just how much of the everyday vocabulary of people in
the Midwest and other regions as
they aren't the kinds of words well he was unfamiliar with, but
television in the airport at that he would hear on the
or Boston or Baltimore. MHe would only run into them if
he stayed long enough to go home
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.
I think this is good evidence to But enough of Caldwell.
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
itself, there would still be were not justifiable in and of
uses for this project that might some very tangible and practical
of our critics. convinSo, who needs DARE?eptical
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.
get letters such as this one And we know it's true when we
who said: DARE has come to my rescue on numerous occasions ee
when I had no idea that an
A good example: a library patron wanted information on dry reglandl.
fish. We looked in
could think of to no avail. As the patron kept repeating
that this fish grew in the
any fish that would grow in the woods, I got to wondering if it
was a regional expression,
A dry land fish is a and of course it was.
And it's not surprising that mushroom. [LAUGHTER]
because 15 of 16 of our examples that letter came from Tennessee
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
Using language clues of mregion, age, race, gender,e education
level, religious background,
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
northern California, well educated, as I put it, for some pprobablyis life in
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.
describe this work to point out the value of DARE as a tool Roger goes that o say: I
I use in doing this profiling. I suspect it may not have
occurred to anyone that law enforcement investigation is
aided by reference
I keep my three volumes of tools such as DARE.
unabridged dictionaries, DARE handy to my desk, along with
and other important references. I find itt invaluable.
Needless to say, it would be
beyond the letter O. if it went
Well, now he has all the [LAUGHTER]
Well, Roger has told us of other way to Z.
able to eliminate suspects from a police list or narrow in on an
criminal party by checking DARE for the distributions of words
that turn up in threat letters
For instance, one pencil and ransom notes.
doorstep of the parents of an abducted child said this: scrawled raDoom note left at the
you ever want to see your precious little girl again?
Put $10,000 cash
Put it in a green trash can on the devil strip at the corner in a diofer bag.
18th and Carlson. Don't bring anybody along.
No cops!! Two exclamation points.
Come alone! Exclamation point.
I'll be watching
Anyone with you, deal is off you all the time.
Three exclamation points. Well, there are a number of
interesting things about the
spelled trash can K-A-N. note, and one is that the writer
spelled daughter D-A-U-T-T-E-R. He sBut he correctly spelled he
precious, he didn't forget the A
right, and except for those in exclamation points, thehing
punctuation was purely standard.
was that the writer was faking So what that suggested to Roger
that a fairly educated person was probably dumbing down ford
the purposes of this note.
was the sentence "put it in the Bgreen trash can on the devile
strip at the corner of 18th and Carlson."
The devil strip?
that? It's not in the Oxford English
Dictionary, it's not in Webster's Third New
International, it's not in the
New World or any other standard dictionary of American English,
but it is in the Dictionary of
And what DARE told him is that American Regional English.
grass between the sidewalk and the devil strip is that strip of
verge, the swail, the tree box, ththe tree line, whatever.he
But the devil strip is used in a
It's used almost solely in the very circumscribed area.
triangle of Youngstown, Cleveland, and Akron, Ohio.
As it happened, on the police suspect list there was one
relatively well-educated man
confronted with the linguistic from Akron, and when he was
he confessed and the child was as well as the other evidence,
So we were really thrilled to know that the work we had done
could contribute in such a
tangibproblem solving.ind of
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.
Madison, gone to West High, then Suppose you had grown up here in
here for medical school. gone to the UW, and had stayed
posted for your internship in rural northern Maine or southern
Appalachia or western New Mexico?
How do you respond when your
been rifting and I got jags in first patient says, "Doc, I've
[LAUGHTER] my leaders."
ground itch. "I've got dew poison, the
kernels, leaders, salt --." I've What do you do?, sore
If you have DARE, you can look
archaic terms for ailments and up these regional and folk and
questions to ask next. diseases and at least know what
rifting and I've got jags in my leaders" is from a doctor who
grew up in Maine and who was
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
And to have jags in the leaders means to have sharp pains in the
tendons, particularly the ones
Well, DARE has also proved to be in the front of your neck.
fields of psychiatry and surprisingly useful in the
About 10 years ago we got a telephone call from a
psychiatrist at the University
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?
Stilts. Y>> Stilts..
Most people in the country do.
showing that in the south and Busouth midland, those arep
commonly called Tom walkers or
And the harp and mouth organ Tommy walkers.
question about a musical terms came in answer to the
probably call... instrument that you would
A harmonica. >> Harmonica.
this part of the country as Mouth organwell.lso heard in
Well the reason that he was interested in these particular
terms is that there's a test
that's used to diagnose aphasia. called the Boston Naming Test
abnormality in which people have Now, aphasia is a brain
words for things. aSo the book is 60 pages, eachh
with a line drawing of something
A pair of scissors, a spoon, a that's common around the house.
stilts, a mask, you get the trellis, aidea., a pair of
The people who take the test are
give a word that describes the shown the picture and asked to
Well, the problem is that the makers of the test developed an
answer key that admits of only
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
poor test, the next step is usually that you'll be given six
or eight weeks of language
So you work carefully with a therapy.
period you're given the test therapist and at the end of that
So if you persist in using your own legitimate regional words,
you're marked wrong again, and
progressing. you're said to be not
Medicare, your therapy will be But if you're being supported by
continue unless you're withheld because they won't
So, I thought this is something I really need to work with the
test makers on, and I tried hard
several years. to get cooperation from them for
willingness, they then stopped Although they first indicated a
mail and telephone calls. rBut a few years ago, just byl
chance, I was at a conference in
publishers exhibit and walked by Boston where I went down to the
publishing all sorts of language a booth for somebody who was
And I started chatting with the person there and she said, oh,
yes, we just bought the Boston
publisher. Naming Test from its earlier
time they produced a new edition And she has agreed that the next
with me to make the answer key of it she will, indeed, work
variation. much more amiable to regional
Well, these are some of the most So I'm very pleased about that.
need DARE, but I can also point dto 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
describe tools and harnesses and to know about the terms used to
Screenwriters need it as well. wagons and derricks.
needed to know about the rent Oparty in African Americannd
culture.
description of it than the We could provide a much better
I give a nod to the natural science researcher who needs to.
know that the bittern, that bird
its long beak up in the air, can that stands out in the slew with
names, including such bewonderfully creative ones asr
barrel maker, belcher squelcher,
dunka-do, post driver, slew bpumper, slug toot, thunder,
pumper, and waller ka-toot. >> Sky poke.
Sky poke and shy poke, both.
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
the $250,000 prize was: according to the Dictionary of
American Regional English, a
flower? raAnd they gave four choices.f a
Anybody know railroad daisy?
Good guess. Actually, it's a black eyed
Susan.
with me that DARE is loved not So, I hope that you'll agree
and autodidacts, but by scholars just by Caldwell's columnists
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
regional terms is in chat groups contemporary examples of
people unselfconsciously use the and blogs on the internet where
with. wWell, if dialects are notp
disappearing but continuing to
for DARE? change iIs it finished?at's next
Far from it.
University Press a sixth volume We'vwith supplementary data.ard
This is going to be a really
which will come out early next useful and fascinating volume
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
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
labels in DARE. eSo if you want to know whathe
words are characteristic of Wisconsin or Connecticut or
Alaska, you can go there and
that was used in the label. Or if you want to know whath
words came into American English
Quechua or Algonquian, you can from Polish or Portuguese or
And if you're a linguist and find all of those as well.
back formation and folk etymology and metaphysics and
metanalysis, you could just go
fusty examples, or you can go to to the OED and find those old
contemporary American English. DARE and find them from
students of today. Much more interesting for
of our data summary, that is the And the third part is sections
were collected so long ago. So if you really care about the
176 names for dust balls under
[LAUGHTER] the bed...
The supplementary volume will Toccur early next year, and by.
late next year we also hope to
launched. Harvard University Press is
working on it now, and the goal is to launch that in September
of 2013.
continue working with the data So when that is live, we will
the old entries using thamagnificent new sources ofate
digital data, and we will add new things that we come across.
So, although a few local terms
a stove, variation in American may seem to melt like butter on
thrive and it provides grist for English dialects continues to
So, thank you very much. our lexicographic mill.
[APPLAUSE]