Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Dictionary of Regional American English, Volume 6 Joan Houston Hall  2/6/13 UP831  cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. 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, Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year, and it's you chance to experience science as exploring the unknown. Tonight, I'm delighted to be able to welcome back to Wednesday Nite at the Lab our speaker Joan Houston Hall. She's been on the staff of the Dictionary of American Regional English, widely known as DARE, since 1975. She became Chief Editor in the year 2000. She is past president of the American Dialect Society and the Dictionary Society of North America and has been a member of the editorial advisory boards for the Journal of English Linguistics, for Verbatim: The Language Quarterly, and Oxford University Press. Having lived in Ohio, California, Idaho, Georgia, Oregon, Maine, and Wisconsin, she 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 since 1975. She became Chief Editor in 2000, following the death of founding editor Frederic G Cassidy. A couple of weeks ago, I took my daughter and son to skate with the Badgers at the Kohl Center. Claire, who is eight, made my day when she said, without hesitation, where's the bubbler. [LAUGHTER] Having grown up in Illinois, I knew that this was a major event because my daughter knows that a drinking fountain is something you throw coins in. So, I'm very delighted to have Joan here again. Every great book needs a companion volume. Tonight we get to hear about volume six, and please join me in welcoming Joan Houston Hall to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you very much, Tom, and thank you all for coming. 

It's a pleasure to be back again. Last April when I spoke with you I was very excited because volume five had just been published. It took us from A through Zydeco, and if you're a fan of Cajun music, you know Zydeco. But I also mentioned that we were working on a sixth volume which wasn't text of the dictionary at all but a volume that is intended to help you use those five volumes. And I'm delighted to say that as of January 8th of this year, volume six is here. I hope that you'll feel free to come up and browse all the volumes when you're done. There are some samples of newsletters that you're welcome to take if you'd like, and if you'd like to get our newsletter, please feel free to sign up for it, and we'll put you on the list. So, now we have a six volume set, as you can see from this slide, the volumes in the middle. I particularly like this picture because in the background you can see some of the original questionnaires that were done between 1965 and 1970. So, from those early volumes up through the 2013, you see the whole history of DARE encapsulated. 

In addition, we're working now with Harvard University Press on the digital edition which we hope will be published late this year. What that means is that anyone with access to the UW libraries or, I'm assuming, to the Madison Public Libraries as well, will be able to use it either at the library or from home. So you'll have access to a book that was somewhat hard to get to before. I'd like to tell you tonight not just what you'll find in volume six, but a couple of other things that are on our plate for the next few years, assuming that we can get funding. And one of those things has to do with making our magnificent collection of audio recordings available to the public. And, at the end, I'll give you some samples of the kind of thing that is in our collection and that you'll be able to hear eventually through the Memorial Library's Digital Collection Center. But first, because some of you weren't here for the April talk, I'd like to give just a thumbnail sketch of what DARE is and why it matters. DARE is a record of the words, the phrases, the pronunciations, bits of grammar, and even little bits of syntax that vary from one part of the country to another. For DARE, a region can be as small as part of a city or as large as the whole country, or almost the whole country as long as it's not the whole country. Like the Oxford English Dictionary, DARE is a historical dictionary which means that we try to find the very earliest example in American English of every word that we include, along with quotations up through the history of every word and as recent a quote as we can get. 

So, for volume five that came out in 2012, what that meant was we had quotations from as late 2011. Those quotations come from novels, poems, histories, government documents, newspapers, diaries, letters, even overheard conversations. Any use of a particular word in American English is grist for our mill. But what makes DARE unique, in addition to the quotations, is that it's also based on a huge project of fieldwork. Some of you probably remember Fred Cassidy. He was quite a well-known figure here in Madison. He came to the UW in 1939, and he tried to get this dictionary off the ground for many, many years, but there was just not enough support. Finally, in 1962, he gave a presentation to the American Dialect Society called The American Dialect Society Dictionary: How Soon? And, finally, they said, well, you're so eager, why don't you do it? So, what he did was to develop a huge questionnaire that had to do with practically anything you can think of that has to do with our daily lives. So, questions about time and weather and food and clothing and farming and animals and hunting and fishing and money and religion and disease and practically anything. More than 1800 questions. 

Then he selected 1,002 communities across the country. He really wanted 1,000, but he thought he might need a couple of extra in case some didn't work, but they all worked. So we have this very strange number. These are communities selected to represent the population as it was in the 1960 census. So, we have communities from the very most urban to the very most rural with all sorts of variations in between. Then he got together a group of 80 fieldworkers. These were mostly graduate students, some faculty, and they were instructed to go out to these selected communities and find people who had lived there all their lives. We wanted to have good representative speakers of every community. So, preferably, not only were they natives but their parents and grandparents would have been also. And then they had to convince them to answer the questions in the questionnaire. 

But if one person did the whole thing, it could take most of a week. So very often it was necessary to find two or three or maybe four other people who were also natives of that community so they could divvy up the parts of the questionnaire. One person might say, well, I don't know anything about hunting and fishing so you better talk to Mr. Jones down the road, but I'll do the family things. But for every person who contributed, we had the data of age, sex, race, amount of education, and community type. So what that means is that in addition to knowing where these people lived, we also know these social statistics. So we can look at a distribution and say, ah, that's proportionally more common among older people than you would suspect. So I think this word is going out of use or it's more common in rural communities, so probably urban people aren't going to know it. So that's another aspect of the entries in DARE that is unusual. Well, when we were done, they had collected more than 2.3 million responses, sent them all back here to Madison where we had some cartographers working on the thing that makes DARE unique. And that is that funny looking map up at the top. 

If you compare the DARE map at the top to the real map at the bottom, you'll see that the DARE states are sort of similar in shape to the real ones. We tried to keep them as similar as possible, but the DARE map is based on population density. So, if you take a look at Connecticut in the real map, you see that it's a really tiny state, but in the DARE map it had to be expanded because, of course, Connecticut has a lot of people. New Mexico, on the other hand, is huge in terms of geographic area, but we had to pull it down to just the little sliver because there are so few people there, proportionally. They look a little strange at first, but you get used to them. And when you see the dots on them that represent the communities where people used a particular word, you can tell right away whether something seems to have a regional pattern. Well, the maps and the quotations along with the definitions and etymologies make DARE a really valuable reference tool to people like linguists and writers and historians, and these were the people we expected to use DARE. But, along the way, we've discovered that there are lots of other people who use it too, and I've been gratified to learn the various kinds of uses. Now, those of you who were here last spring will have heard these three examples, and I apologize for repeating them, but I think they're terrific examples of ways people can use this research that we had never anticipated. For instance, here's an excerpt from a librarian in Cookville, Tennessee. 

She 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 repeated that this fish grew in the woods, and I couldn't imagine any type of fish that would grow in the woods, I finally got to wondering if it was a regional expression. And, of course, it was. A dry land fish is..." Anybody guess? A mushroom. And some of the informants explained its name by saying it smells like a fish when its rotten. [LAUGHTER] And it's very interesting that this letter came from Tennessee because our evidence shows that 15 out of 16 of the responses were from either Kentucky or Tennessee. But librarians are pretty expectable users of a reference book like this, so how about a different take? We had a letter from a forensics linguist. He told us of a case in which a pencil scrawled ransom note was left on the doorstep of the parents of a child that had been abducted. 

The note said this. "Do you ever want to see you precious little girl again? Put $10,000 cash in a diaper bag. Put it in the green trash can on the devil strip on the corner of 18th and Carlson. Don't bring anybody along. No cops!!" Two exclamation points. "Come alone! One 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 several interesting things about this note. 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 spelled precious right, he didn't forge the A in diaper, he spelled watching right, and, except for those exclamation points, the punctuation was purely standard. So what this forensic linguist wondered was whether we had a relatively well-educated person who was dumbing down for the purposes of the note. But what really caught his eye was the sentence "put it in the green trash can on the devil strip." The devil strip? Where can he find out about that? It's not in the Oxford English Dictionary. It's not in Webster's 3rd or American Heritage or any standard dictionary of American English, but it is in DARE where it is defined as that strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. The city of Madison calls it a terrace. There are lots of other nicely regional terms for it. Well, what's interesting is that our evidence shows that devil strip is used in a very circumscribed area. It's used almost solely in the triangle outlined by Youngstown, Cleveland, and Akron, Ohio. As it turned out, this case was in Illinois, I believe, on the police suspect list there was a relatively well-educated man from Akron, and when he was confronted with the linguistic as well as the other evidence, he confessed. So we were really thrilled that the work we've done could be used in such a tangible way. 

So, law enforcement is a good example of a field we hadn't predicted as benefiting from our work, but how about physicians? Suppose you had grown up here in Madison, gone to UW, stayed here for medical school, and then, for your first job, found yourself posted to rural northern Maine, southern Appalachia, western New Mexico. What would you do when your patient came and said, doc, I've got the ground itch? I've got dew poisoning. Got sore kernels. Leaders. Pones. Salt room. Well, if you had DARE, you could look up these regional and folk terms for ailments and diseases and know what questions to ask next. One of my favorite emails came from a physician who had grown up in Maine and had had his first job in western Pennsylvania, and he told of having one of his first patients come in and say, doc, I've been rifting and I got jags in my leaders. [LAUGHTER] Well, it turns out that in western Pennsylvania, and almost only in western Pennsylvania, to rift means... Anybody know? To belch or burp. 

And to have jags in your leaders is to have sharp pains in these tendons in the front of your neck. So these things this doctor later discovered in DARE and thought, boy, if I had only had that when I was a new doctor in Pennsylvania. So that's your quick introduction to DARE and some of the ways it's proved to be very useful. But let's get back to our brand new volume, volume six, which is intended to enhance the use of the others. Well, I mentioned that many of the DARE entries have a map included with the text, and here's an example of one. This, of course, is answer to the question, what do you call a sandwich in a long bun with meats and cheeses and lettuce and tomatoes? And, of course, many people call it a submarine or a submarine sandwich or a sub. All three are represented on this map. And you can see that although the boundaries of this map aren't very clear, there are distinct places where it's very dominant and other places where it's practically not heard at all. So this is the kind of pattern that's interesting to us. But in the entry itself for submarine sandwich, at the very beginning it says, also called Cuban sandwich, grinder, hero, hoagie, Italian sandwich, not the same as the Chicago Italian beef, poor boy, spucky, torpedo, wedge, and zep. 

Well, up until volume six came out, what you had to do is go to those other five volumes, flip through the pages, find the entry for hero or hoagie or grinder and hold the pages open while you looked at sub and torpedo, and it was very clumsy and cumbersome but you could find the information. Well, with volume six, it's all laid out for you so that you can see the panoply of regional synonyms right in one place. So you can see that the Cuban is almost solely in Florida. The grinder is New England. The hero is dense in New York City and upstate New York but sort of scattered elsewhere. Hoagie is chiefly New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It's spread a bit since this work was done. Italian sandwich here is almost solely in Maine and New Hampshire. Poor boy, chiefly in the Gulf states, though scattered elsewhere. Submarine and torpedo. 

So, the whole country is represented by this series of maps, and it's really fun just to flip open the pages and find a concept and see the synonyms that vary from one place of the country to another. Let me give you another example. One of the questions was, when people bring hot dishes to a meeting place and share them together, you would call that a...? And you'd probably say? >> Potluck. >> A potluck. Anything else? Well, as you can see from the bottom right map, potluck is very, very common in this part of the country, across to the northwest and down the west coast. Has some dense places in the northeast as well, but what's interesting is that if you look at the potluck map and then look at the covered dish map, you can see that they're almost mirror images. They're wonderfully complimentary, and they take up much of the country. But that's not everything because, as you can see, in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa some people call it a basket dinner. In Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and scattered elsewhere it's a carry-in. Now, we learned early on that this is a term we didn't want to pronounce too fast. 

[LAUGHTER] The dinner on the grounds map is chiefly south Midland and Gulf south, and that fits very nicely because the dinner on the grounds is usually a basket dinner or potluck that's held after a church service. And in Indiana it's often a pitch-in dinner. One more on the next page. In upstate New York and Pennsylvania it can be a tureen dinner. So this, again, is a wonderful variety of terms for the very same thing. Since we're on this next page with another little bit of folklore, let me quickly talk about the next one which has to do with what you call the little piece of food that you leave on a plate to show your hostess that you are just so full you can't eat another bite. In the south Atlantic and part of the Gulf area it's the last button on Gabe's coat. Or, also in the Gulf south, it's the last pea in the dish. Down at the bottom right you can see that old maid is found pretty widely across the country. But over on the left where it says manner, manner is the head word under which this particular entry is found, but it's usually plural and it's often the manners. 

So you might say better not take the manners. Or be sure and leaves the manners piece. So, with these entries, we get a bit of American folklore along with the vocabulary. The next three slides are a little bit different because they don't give you synonyms for one thing. Instead, it's kind of like a cultural map of how Americans like to spend their leisure time if they're playing cards. So, we asked what games, card games, people liked to play, and you can see that Bid Whist is mostly south Atlantic and south Midland. And, although you can't tell here, the entry will tell you that this is especially frequent among African Americans. Cribbage is chiefly north and west. Euchre you won't be surprised to be very dense in this part of the country. 500 is another northern one. 

5 Up, very southern. 500 is like Euchre but it has 500 points that you have to get to. 5 Up is another one that's especially among African Americans, but the people who gave us that term didn't bother to tell us what the game was, so we don't have much information on that. And 42 is a domino game. In Pennsylvania, they play Hasenpfeffer. It's another one that's similar to Euchre. California, and in this area as well, Pedro is a popular game. And I'm told that it is Pedro rather than Pedro, though I'm surprised about the California there. Pinochle is widespread across most of the country but pretty sparse in the south. Pitch has a weird distribution with that central area plus a northeastern component. 

Rook is a trademark game, but apparently it's very popular in the south. Rummy is kind of scattered in the north. And finally we get to something that will strike home with you, I'm sure. Scheisskopf, Sheepshead, and Schmier. All very nicely Wisconsin terms. And set back in the south Atlantic. Well, in addition to these kinds of maps in volume six, we also have maps that show how words vary depending on the age, the sex, the race, the education, and the community type of the people who use the words. I didn't include them because they're a little hard to read from a distance, but feel free to browse through them in volume six after we're done. Volume six, then, has more than 1700 maps, but it also has a humongous index. You might think, huh, why does a dictionary that's alphabetical in order need an index? Well, the DARE entries have lots and lots of labels, regional labels, social labels, etymological labels. 

So, in the index, you can answer all sorts of questions. Suppose you wonder what words are labeled as being especially common in Wisconsin. Well, you go to the index for Wisconsin and you can glance through these and see whether they ring a bell with you. Some of them are so old that they may not be at all common anymore. If you see an asterisk before the head word, what that means is it's a negative label. So it's common except here. So you can just kind of ignore those.  And finally. But the index includes more than regional labels. Suppose you were curious about what words had come into American English from, say, Norwegian. 

You would look under Norwegian, and you would find terms such as -- fruit soup, ish and ishy and krum kaka, lefse, lutefisk, norske, -- uff da, and many others. Or if you're a teacher and you want to show your students some of the processes that happen as language changes, you might look under folk etymology. Now, folk etymology is a really fun process. It's the changing of words to make them make sense to the person who is using them if he or she doesn't really understand what it means or where it comes from. So, for instance, you find examples such as bankrupture for bankruptcy, leapfrog milk... [LAUGHTER] For Liebfraumilch, old timer's disease for Alzheimer's disease, or very coarse veins for varicose veins. [LAUGHTER] So this very extensive index is a major part of volume six, but this volume also includes the whole DARE questionnaire. So if you're interested in answering the questions, feel free to do so. Or if you want to take the questionnaire and go to you grandmother, your grandchildren, your aunts and uncles and friends and see what they say. It's a fascinating experience, and what most people find is that even people to whom they're closely related don't always use the same words they do, and that's really fun to find. 

Whoops, I guess I got the wrong one. This section shows some of the questions about families and then about courtship, marriage, and having children. And in the Z questions, it looks pretty straightforward and sort of boring. What do you call father, mother, grandfather, grandmother? You might think, well, of course it's a grandmother or maybe a grandma or maybe grandmom or gramma, but if you look at all the examples we collected, you find that words like this tell a lot about people and about regions. So, for instance, we had very interesting distributions for granny, grammy, nanna, big mama, me maw, oma, mormor, and others, all of which tell you something, both about the region and about the person. And, finally, in this volume we have every answer to 430 of the questions that were asked in the original fieldwork. So if you really care about the 176 names you can use for those dust balls under the bed, this is where you can find out. They're listed in descending order of frequency. I won't show all of them because they didn't fit nicely on a PowerPoint, but here are some.  And in addition to these there are things like cattails, house moss, midnight fuzz, mimies, moots -- woozies, and many others. 

So that's what's in our very latest volume. But volume six isn't the end. As I said, the digital edition is underway right now, but we have two other projects that we are very hopeful that we can get started with. One of the things that people remark on when I talk about DARE is, well, it's all very interesting but that fieldwork was done almost 50 years ago and language changes. Yes, it does. What many people like to say is that American English has become homogenized by the mobility of our population and by all the media, and it sounds like a plausible idea. But what I reply is, yes language changes, it's always changing, but it doesn't change in the same ways, at the same rates, in all places. So, yes, some of our regional terms will be pushed out by commercial terms if they take hold and there's lots of advertising, but there are thousands of others that will never be pushed out because there's no reason for them to be. There isn't a commercial term that would substitute, and when we're using them among our family and friends, there's no reason to be influenced by the media. So, thousands of wonderful regionalisms will persist, and others will come into the language wherever they fill a need. 

So that's a good explanation as far as it goes. But the only way we will really know for sure what has happened to particular words over the last 50 years is to start some new fieldwork. And that's a project that we hope to undertake very soon. But it would be way too expensive and too time consuming to do it the way it was done the first time. That took six years and many dollars. So, what we're hoping to do is to work with the UW Survey Center right here on campus. We will develop and administer an online questionnaire. What we'll do is start out in Wisconsin, use that as a pilot survey for the eventual nationwide work, and we'll go back to the original 22 communities, ask the same questions, try to find, again, people who have lived there all their lives, and then compare the responses so we can say, okay, this word seemed to be old fashioned in 1965 to 1970 and we don't have any examples of it now. Or this was used in a small area but now it's much more widespread. We'll also choose 18 new communities, because based on the 2010 census, Wisconsin has lost significant population relative to the rest of the country. 

So we'll be dropping down from 22 communities to 18, and in those communities we'll also try to find people who've lived there all their lives. And so we'll have a new baseline to see what's happening there. Well, we'll ignore some of the questions that we know are obsolete. Methods of plowing with oxen, for instance. We don't even have to pretend. But we will also add new questions, either because we forgot them last time or because things didn't even exist. So we're trying to come up with a very exhaustive list of concepts that didn't exist before but might have regional variants for their answers today. So, a few examples that we might ask are things like this.  We have a pretty long list, but if you can think of things that you think probably have regional variation and didn't exist 50 years ago, please drop me an email and let me know because it's certainly easy to neglect something, and we'd like to be as inclusive as possible. So, when it gets time to do this we'll be publicizing it through press releases, through UW communications, through social media, through libraries, posters, and if you fit the criteria for a particular community or you know someone who does, I hope that you'll urge that person, or do it yourself, and become involve in the new fieldwork. 

Well, the other thing that we're working on right now relates back to the very original fieldwork when the people who asked the questions also asked their respondents to do a tape recording. Now, reel to reel tape recorders were pretty new at that time, and so quite a few people were just leery and didn't want to do it. But, of the 2700 people who answered parts of the questionnaire, 1843 did agree to make a tape recording. So we have a magnificent collection of speech from all over the country. Not only does it give us a comparable set of data to compare from one place to another, but it also a magnificent piece of oral history. It opens many windows on to mid-20th century American culture. So what we'd like to do is post these at the Digital Collection Center, but before we do that, we have to take some steps to, some people say sanitize them, I say make them confidential. These people were told that their names would be confidential and that all of the materials would be used for scholarly research. Now, this was done way back before the age of IRBs and human subjects research, but we did tell them it was confidential and so we are certainly going to make sure that's true. So what we want to do is take each tape recording and have it listened to, and any time a personal name is used, we'll insert a bleep the same length as that particular word so that no one can be identified by the particular names and it will be possible to make these widely available. 

The excerpts I'm going to play will give you a sense of the wealth of materials in this collection, not just with respect to regional and social dialects, but also as a rich source of American cultural history. We're going to listen to seven short excerpts from different parts of the country and from speakers who have very different backgrounds. You can follow along on the transcripts on your handout. We'll start with a lumberman from southern Maine who's reminiscing about using oxen and sleds to cut trees in the winter. And, as was true of many DARE informants, he seemed a little bit wistful about the changes he's observed over his lifetime. >> The farm would haul lumber with oxen and sleds in the wintertime, and [BLEEP]. One year we saw four million feet of lumber in one year. And then, not long after that, the -- come in here. [INAUDIBLE]  >> The next excerpt comes from Queens, New York City, where we have an elderly black woman who worked as a domestic helper, and she's talking about having to take her employer's laundry home to wash it. She also reflects on the differences over time on how people do or don't manage to work well together. 

>> I have to wash an item and then take them back again when I've got 'em finished. >> How would you take it from their house to your house? >> I had to bring them on a wagon or something. Sometimes an aunt of mine and she used to take and wash them, and her daughter and I, we used to go and get the clothes, and they'd have those big, long baskets, you know, with the handles on each end. So she'd take hold of one end and I'd take hold of the other end, and that's the way we'd bring them home. When her mother had clothes that had to be taken, I used to go and help her to get them. When my mother had clothes to go and get, she used to come and help me go take them. So everybody, in those days, they was congenial. They helped one another along, but they don't do that today. Everybody's for themselves today. >> You really think there's a difference? >> There sure is. 

When I was a girl you could go out and leave your door open, unlocked. Nobody would bother it. You better not go out now and leave your door open. >> We'll move next to southwestern Virginia where a woman who was 37 at the time was reminiscing about her grandmother's adventure with a panther. Listen carefully to this. There are not only regional pronunciations, regional vocabulary, and regional grammatical forms, but this reminisce is done in the typical style of an Appalachian narrative. It's perfectly formatted and very parallel in structure. It's a really nice story. >> So, she was on her way to the mill with a turn of corn, and she had this dark part of the forest to go through. So she heard this panther, and they sound very much like a woman, back in the days when they was running wild in the mountains. 

So she heard it and she knowed that it was nearby. And when they sound like they're right at you, they're far away, but when they sound like they're far away, they're right at you. So she knew that the panther was getting close to her, and she started her horse to running, but it was too late. The panther jumped out of the bushes right behind her in the road. So she ran as fast as she could, and it kept gaining on her. And it got close enough to scratch her horses hip. So she took off her bonnet, and she throwed it back, and the panther took time to tear it up. So she got a little ahead that time, and he caught up again. So she took off her blouse, and she kept on that way until she had nothing left except her riding skirt. And at last she throwed her corn off to it, and he took time to tear it up. 

And by that time, she was coming in sight of the mill, and she was screaming and there was some men standing out at the mill. As usual, they'd stand around and talk while their corn was being ground. And she was screaming that a panther was after her. And she just ran into a little curve, and this panther had stop to tear the corn up, and she made it into the mill and panther come around the curve after he tore up her sack of corn and these men killed it, and it measured 10-foot from the tip of its tail to the tip of its nose. >> Moving next to Mississippi. We have an elderly black woman who was a farmer talking with a young white male fieldworker from Alabama. Both of them have distinctive dialects, and in this excerpt it shows that a vegetable that we tend to think of as pretty contemporary, kohlrabi, was actually grown way back 50 years ago, even if people had a different notion about how it was pronounced. >> We had some celery and some asparagus and, let's see, what else? Some kohlrabi. >> What? >> Kohlrabi. >> What's kohlrabi? >> It grows up like a cabbage, but you see the -- in the ground. 

But this is not in the ground, it's above the ground. It grows about that big, some of them, and the little leaves grow all around that. [INAUDIBLE] >> You eat the bottom part? >> You eat the whole thing. It has a little stem on the bottom like a Christmas tree. >> I see. Now, what you call this? >> Kohlrabi. >> Kohlrabi? >> [INAUDIBLE] And the lettuce, we grow lettuce. Radishes, we got radishes. That's about all, I believe. I can't think of anything else right now. 

[INAUDIBLE] >> And you and [BLEEP] do all this work with the garden? >> Yes, sir. >> From here we jump to the west coast where there's another really interesting interchange between the informant and the fieldworker. The informant is a man of Basque heritage in southeastern Oregon who raises sheep. And the fieldworker is someone who grew up in New York City and before he went out as a DARE fieldworker had never driven a car. So his adventures in the far west were really something, and, as you'll see, he learned quite a bit in this little interchange. >> We had some celery... >> Whoops, sorry. >> You do a lot of drafting on a sheep too. [INAUDIBLE]  >> Why do you have to skin it? >> So it can retain... >> Oh, you mean you skin it so it doesn't have the smell? >> [INAUDIBLE] You skin it. 

You don't split it down the center. You skin it like, you know how you skin a coyote? >> No. >> Well, you skin that the same way. And you just jacket and pull it right over the top. >> What do you mean by jacket? >> Well, the skin is whole. >> Oh, you put the dead lamb skin over the live? >> Yeah, see. >> I see. >> Then you let it suck and several days they'll get used to it, see. >> Could you explain what jacketing it means? That's when you put it over? >> You just put the skin, just like putting a coat on yourself, you take the other lamb's skin and put it over the top of the other lamb. >> Like a jacket. 

>> Yeah, you put the jacket on. [LAUGHTER] >> I wonder whether he really knew how a coyote is skinned. [LAUGHTER] Moving up north and east, we talk with a woman from Nebraska who not only reminisces about what it was like on the ranch when she was a child but also tells about learning a linguistic taboo. >> And then we had horses and stock of all kinds, chickens among others. And she churned butter because you didn't run to the supermarket and buy your groceries in those days. You had you own milk that you skinned the cream off and saved it because you didn't have separators then. And she churned the butter in an old crock churn with the stomper up and down. And my two older sisters would take turns at churning. >> How many children were in your family? >> Well, there was just the three of us at that time. And then some of the experiences I had as a child on the ranch, we had a young fellow, which was accustomed in the those days, his mother had died and he didn't have a family, and he came to live with my folks at the age of 14. 

So he was sort of an older brother to me and I tagged along, but he did have a half brother who was very dark. And whenever he would come to visit him he would come out and say, hi, you old black SOB. And so I thought that sounded pretty good, so one day I ran and I said, hi, you old black son of a ###. So that horrified George and he just thought he better curb his language a little while I was around. >> Now, you were a little girl then? >> I was probably about three. [LAUGHTER] >> And we'll round out the tour close to home in Superior. >> And then as soon as the snow flies, it happens every year, but still the children greet it as if they hadn't seen it for 10 years. They just can't wait for a lot of snow to fall, and that's the occasion to get the snowmobile out from the garage and go out in the country and have a screaming good time bouncing and jouncing over the snow drifts, and of course the farmers get awfully angry when the snowmobiles plow into their pastures and take down fences and scatter potato chip packages. But the snowmobiles are getting more numerous all the time. And being a nurse working in a hospital, I can testify to the fact that emergency rooms are kept pretty busy with the victims of falls from toboggans. 

Toboggans seem especially dangerous for people who start at the top of a long slide and just go free wheeling to the bottom. If they connect with a tree or a bush or a barbed wire fence, they land in the emergency room. But still, toboggans are very popular. [LAUGHTER] >> So, I hope that you'll agree that although DARE has reached some major milestones in the last year, there's still some fascinating work to be done. We've been supported for nearly 50 years on soft money, grants from the National Endowment Fund of Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, some from the graduate school here and the College of L&S, as well as hundreds, literally hundreds, of individuals who simply love language and wanted to see this finished. Unfortunately, federal funding is getting harder to get, the university is being squeezed, and gifts from foundations and individuals have plummeted during the recession. So, if any of you know of foundations or corporations or individuals who are interested in this kind of thing and you think they might be interested in contributing, please let me know. I would be delighted to contact them. I think it would be a shame if we had to stop before the work was finished. Well, thank you for listening, and if you have questions, I'd be happy to answer them. 

[APPLAUSE]