Can a person fall in love with a dictionary? If the work in question is the Dictionary of American Regional English, which has just published its fifth volume, Sl-Z, the answer appears to be yes.
“I hope people look at DARE,” as the series is known, “and fall in love with it just the way anyone who starts to use it ends up doing,” says Michael Adams, an associate professor of English at Indiana University at Bloomington.
“I think everyone who runs into DARE loves everything about it,” says Erin McKean, founder of the online dictionary Wordnik.
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Listen: Joan Houston Hall discusses some of her favorite vernacular words and phrases. (11:07) | Link
“A national treasure,” says Kirk Hazen, a linguistics professor at West Virginia University.
I am by profession a copy editor. We love defining words so much, we do it for a living. Yet most of us aren’t as ebullient over, say, Merriam-Webster as the members of the American Dialect Society (like those quoted above) are about DARE. Copy editors need to work fast; we want our dictionaries accessible and contemporary—online. The dialect society’s project has taken half a century, and Volume VI, which includes indexes by region and etymology to all the words in I through V, won’t be out until next year. Each volume has at least 900 pages; the latest? 1,244. And you can get to them only in libraries, where they sit on the shelf, all five of them, tall, blue, inaccessible. I wasn’t feeling the love.
Besides, who cares where Americans stop saying “bucket” and start saying “pail”?
Then I learned that Harvard University Press, DARE’s publisher, will put the project’s entries, audiotapes, and perhaps even maps online in 2013. And I read a few pages in the books. I wasn’t smitten, but a seduction of sorts had begun.
Most dictionaries, like the Oxford English Dictionary and American Heritage, are made by lexicographers who cull words from written texts. James Murray, the primary editor of the OED, wrote letters, asking, Is this a term you use for such and such, and could you please reply? Few if any lexicographers get words from people face to face.
For the regional dictionary that Frederic G. Cassidy began in 1962, the English professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison wanted something different: a broad, systematic sample of both the written and spoken words of a nation—a snapshot of America’s regional expressions at a particular time.
So from 1965 to 1970, he sent researchers, mostly graduate students, out in “word wagons"—campers equipped with tape recorders—to talk to people in America.
Nineteen sixty-five? Word wagons and tape recorders? Today’s linguists write Python scripts to search tweets; online-dictionary editors use algorithms to find words on the Internet. How could DARE be relevant?
“We tend to think nowadays that anything worth knowing is digital,” says Wordnik’s McKean, an adviser on DARE’s board. “But in fact there are huge swaths of information that people just haven’t bothered to write down,” like names for children’s games, plants, foods, charms that bring good or bad luck, terms for weather and physical geography. “These are all things that we find fascinating, but if we don’t take the time to write them down, they’ll be lost.” Her favorite word in the dictionary is “mubble-squibble,” which to turn-of-the-last-century North Carolinians meant the knuckle-rub you give a child on his head.
Not all DARE’s words are as onomatopoeic or cute. Hazen, a linguist in the English department at West Virginia, sends history-of-language students to the books to look for names for people from different regions—"hillbilly,” “Hoosier"—or for racial groups, like the inflammatory alternative pronunciation of “Negro.” (That word is too offensive to be printed in today’s newspapers, but DARE devotes 14 and a half pages to it and its related compounds, culminating in one that ends in"-wool” and is sometimes used to refer to a sedge, Carex filifolia.)
He then asks his students to discuss their findings; they are not always comfortable with that. “For some it is eye-opening to look at the history of derogatory terms and how openly they were used,” he says, because certain words in newspapers, quoted in DARE, would be unimaginable today. Many students won’t say the words, even in class. But they are always surprised when they learn, for example, that the etymology of “Hoosier” proves it not the endearing nickname many Indianans assume, but a term used by Southern blacks for racist white people.
Joan Houston Hall, who took over as chief editor when Cassidy retired (he died in 2000 at age 92), says the books don’t flinch at American speech, no matter how offensive, scatological, or sexual. While editors omit terms used too widely to count as regional, they would never “bowdlerize the dictionary.”
Indeed, what Cassidy wanted was a corpus of words unlikely to get into print, phrases like “lick ‘im so’s his hide won’t hold hay” or “ish kabibble” (meaning “I couldn’t care less”) that people might say but never write.
To get words like that, a questionnaire would be key, and Cassidy was the person to write it. As a graduate student in the 30s at the University of Michigan, he had worked on the “Early Modern English Dictionary,” which, though never published, had introduced him to dictionary making. In 1947, at Wisconsin, he carried out the Wisconsin English Language Survey, a methodical vocabulary study of 50 communities in the state. In the 1950s, a Fulbright took him to his native Jamaica—he had emigrated at age 11—where he made recordings of Jamaicans talking about growing pineapple, cutting sugar cane, fishing, and making dugout canoes. That work became a book, Jamaica Talk. He eventually helped write a dictionary of Jamaican English.
Cassidy was the right person to get the money for DARE, too. The dictionary he had worked on as a graduate student at Michigan sought big financing and failed. Now a professor, Cassidy insisted that the dialect society publish his full questionnaire, more than 1,800 questions he wrote with Audrey R. Duckert, a graduate student, so that potential backers would see the project’s scope.
And the National Endowment for the Humanities, a young agency looking for novel ways to spend taxpayers’ money to help scholars, was ready for a project like Cassidy’s. “The diversity of America is never more evident than in its speech,” says Judy Havemann, director of communications at the endowment. “We and the dictionary grew up together.”
If it was the questions that captivated NEH grant reviewers—different ones, year after year—to the tune of $10.4-million since 1970, it is the answers that invite readers today.
Some 80 fieldworkers rolled out across America, collecting more than two million responses to the hundreds of questions, from 2,777 people in 1,002 communities. The queries started neutrally about time and weather—"What do you call the big clouds that roll up high before a rainstorm?” (anvil head, thundercap) and progressed through concrete items like houses, furniture, utensils, foods, vegetables, farm buildings, and vehicles. Then came more abstract questions about honesty and dishonesty, beliefs, emotions, courtship, family relationships:
“Words or expressions meaning violently angry” (madder than a wet hen);
“When a man goes to see a girl often, and seems to want to marry her, he’s ____ her” (beauin’ her around);
“Words for a child whose parents were not married—serious words” (woods colt).
It took time to ask the 1,623 questions that the researchers ultimately used in most states, and the answers came from more than one person in a community; workers went back multiple times in their campers, with “University of Wisconsin” painted on the side. Northerners were not very popular in the South of the late 1960s, so researchers there were careful to check in with the local sheriff, both to find informants and to establish their legitimacy. (The word wagons proved too expensive to maintain; eventually most researchers traveled by car.) But the South, “with its agrarian culture, and therefore more oral culture,” Hall says, was one of “the most rich in words and phrases that are amazingly interesting.”
The enterprise might seem quaint today, but in some ways it was progressive. Researchers were asking exactly the same questions, in the same order, in communities chosen methodically, in proportion to population and historical settlement, to people ages 18 to 90. “People who were elderly at that time had lived through incredible changes in our society and would still know the words that had to do with early kinds of agriculture and pre-telephone and -telegraph, pre-electrification,” says Hall. Fieldworkers recorded age, race, gender, community type, occupation, and education of every informant, and whether an audiotape was made. Guaranteed anonymity, each interviewee got an identifying number, and every response was coded and fed into a big Univac 1100 mainframe computer back in Madison. Cassidy, though in his 60s at the height of the collecting, knew that the data were unique, and that the only way they would ever be part of a dictionary was via computers, massive and un-user-friendly as they were at the time.
That is why today, for the entry “thank-you-ma’am,” one finds: “1965-70 DARE ... (Qu. N27b, When unpaved roads get very rough you call them ____) Inf MA68, Thank-you-ma’am—when there’s a hump in it.” By looking in Volume I’s List of Informants, you can find informant MA68. He was white, male, had a high-school education, lived in a village, and worked for the local government. He was born in 1889. He told a DARE fieldworker that a hump in the road was a “thank-you-ma’am,” in 1969. A map next to the entry shows a distribution of dots, concentrated in New England, for all the informants who said the same. The United States are recognizable but oddly shaped: Connecticut is bigger than New Mexico; New York has a giant panhandle for Manhattan; Florida has no panhandle at all. The stylized maps reflect the population of the United States in 1960, the most recent census for the collection period.
I was starting to appreciate what a vast undertaking Cassidy began, and what a trove for researchers Hall and her team have now completed. And that isn’t all.
While those midcentury workers were out talking to people, researchers in Madison were combing literature, government documents, newspapers, history books, and other printed works to find other examples of words found by the surveys. Editors included the earliest example they could find of a word, as well as the most contemporary.
The earliest “thank-you-ma’am” was in 1849, in Longfellow’s novel Kavanagh: “We went like the wind over the hollows in the snow;—The driver called them ‘thank-you-ma’ams’ because they make everybody bow.” The most recent example is from 1985.
And the reader who looks up, for example, “slue-footed,” finds this: “1945 Saxon Gumbo Ya-Ya 496 LA, She is hoping her galloping, slue-foot, light brown, lazy husband ... will soon find a job.” Gumbo Ya-Ya, you learn from the new Volume V’s bibliography, is a compilation by Lyle Saxon that was part of the Louisiana Writers’ Program. But what is a gumbo ya-ya? Back to Volume II: “a gathering of women in which there is much chattering and gossip.” (Louisiana, 1941.)
It is impossible to look for one word without getting sidetracked by another. In DARE’s every word, a story.
OK, if I still wasn’t over head and ears (Indiana, 1843) in love with this dictionary, I was beginning to see, from “Aaron’s rod” to “zydeco,” its utility. A forensic linguist might use it to analyze the words in a ransom note, as did Roger Shuy, now an emeritus professor at Georgetown University. (“Leave the money on the devil strip,” a kidnapper had written, referring to the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb as only someone from Akron or Youngstown, Ohio, would. With Shuy’s help, he was caught.) A doctor might look up terms he encounters in remote regions: “pone” (a welt); “bealed” (infected); “jags” (sharp pains).
While DARE was clearly good for doctors and bad for kidnappers, some linguists, the syntacticians and phonologists who make that discipline seem so rarefied, might nevertheless rue all the money spent by NEH, NSF, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the New York Times Foundation, and many others to define “hi cock the oriole” (a children’s game) or “eleventy-eleven” (an undefinably large number). What does DARE offer them?
“Butterfly collectors,” Walt Wolfram, a professor at North Carolina State University, calls those who gather words, Cassidy style. It is a term of art among linguists who conduct what they consider the more important business of making sense of language’s ways. But Wolfram isn’t being unkind. Some hard-core syntacticians might have that patronizing view of DARE, he says, but even they probably secretly find it fun. “There are some beautiful butterflies to be admired,” he says.
Wolfram leads a team of graduate students in one of the largest sociolinguistic departments in the country. They study how language use symbolically represents fundamental dimensions of social behavior and human interaction. They might actually care whether people say “bucket” or “pail"—or more fundamentally, how they say it, and where they do, because words signal community. (You might not feel tremendous solidarity with the people who say “bucket,” but if you add up all the variations that create the language of a place, together they help you feel part of that place.) Wolfram was skeptical when DARE began, but now he and his graduate students buy from DARE CD’s of the recorded interviews. They use them to, for example, analyze the vowels of speakers in Ohio, to study dialects, how they are changing, and what that means. (One provocative example of a sociolinguistic study is the thesis that the sound systems of the English spoken by inner-city African-Americans and the English of working-class whites have diverged in certain ways over the course of several generations.)
“It’s a great corpus for us,” Wolfram says, because most linguistic atlases, if they have recordings, elicit only words. DARE’s conversational interviews, which his team puts on the department’s Web site in order to use Web-based analytical tools, are more useful. All that federal and private money has yielded an unbelievably rich database.
Next year, when Harvard University Press puts DARE online, that kind of analysis will be even easier. Emily Arkin, editor for digital publication development at the press, says the challenge is to balance the needs of “power users” like Wolfram with the needs of a general audience. “There are people interested in DARE because their grandmother was part of the survey,” says Arkin. Details of exactly what will go online, and how, are still being decided, as is how institutions will buy access, but audio recordings and some aspect of the mapping data are planned.
And if the project continues, as Joan Hall hopes it will, one day digital DARE might include maps based on the 2010 census.
Hall is thinking about how to go back to the same 1,002 communities visited in the 1960s, with mostly the same survey, to see how language has changed. She is not sure how that will happen, but it won’t be in word wagons.
Old-fashioned as they seem, the word wagons caught the public’s imagination, and that is perhaps the legacy of DARE for linguistics as a discipline. If the books bring words, and the idea of dialect, and the concept that language changes when different groups meet, into the public mind, that can only be good for those who study what that means. In times of shrinking budgets, with universities being forced to teach job-related skills, “unless we connect with the public, we are going to die,” says Walt Wolfram. “So whatever DARE is or isn’t in terms of research, it is a great marketing tool for the linguistics profession, even if it is an outlier in terms of what most linguists do.”
Can a person fall in love with a dictionary? At five volumes and 5,263 pages, DARE is playing hard to get. But what these books offer—a snatch of small talk from places long past—is beyond definition.
