the curious grammar of Ohio

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 27, 2004, at 8:50 AM, i wrote:

> from David Blaustein's review of Keith Banner's The Smallest People
> Alive, in the Lambda Book Report, August/September 2004, p. 25:
> -----
> Another unifying idea is simply the context of the book: The stories
> are all set in Ohio, where Banner lives.  Banner uses the curious
> grammar of the region to great effect throughout his book...  Whether
> Banner is comfortable being labeled as a regional writer or not, he
> has produced a work that is wholly of a specific place and time.
> -----

well, i've now read the book, and blaustein's praise of its regional
specificity is much more puzzling than before.  the *settings* are (for
the most part) clearly regional, though most of them could be
translated to hardscrabble areas anywhere in the country -- rural new
england, california's central valley, whatever -- without losing
anything important in the characterizations or plots.  banner has
merely set his stories in places like those he knows well.  and the
*language* his characters use shows barely any regional specificity at
all; with a tiny number of exceptions, it's colloquial working-class
speech of the sort that you can hear anywhere in the u.s. (and that has
been represented well in fiction for a long time).

first, general colloquial features, all of them appearing many times in
the book's 260 pages:
        prospective "gonna", obligative "gotta"
        subject omission, of the "Saw him yesterday" sort
        initially reduced questions, of the "She okay?" and "When you gonna
go?" sorts
        expletives like "the fuck" and other taboo vocabulary [oddly, banner
doesn't use taboo vocabulary for 'penis', instead uniformly employing
"thing", as in "his thing" and "my thing"]
        the tag "and shit"
        reinforcing reflexives, as in "Edgar and myself go way back"

then, general working-class vernacular features, again appearing many
times in the book; most of this list of features can be found in
mencken:
        "ain't"
        "anyways"
        past tense "done"
        accusative coordinate subject pronouns: "Him and me had movies"
        multiple negation
        determiner "them": "them guys"
        past form for past participle: "have ran"
        transparent "type of": "these type of things"
        "of" with exceptional degree modifiers: "too Adj of a N"
        invariant singular in existentials": "There was a lot of people there"

i found only *four* features that might be described as truly regional,
and each occurs only *once* in the book (ok, i might have missed an
occurrence, but these features are really really thin on the ground):
        "dern" for "darn" (what *is* its regional distribution?)
        "sack" 'bag'
        the vernacular ethical dative: "I need me a gun" (what *is* the
regional distribution of this one?)
        "want" + past participle: "The main reason Irene wanted divorced..."
note: no positive "anymore", and only one "want/need Ved".  plus one
ethical dative, which might just be another widespread vernacular
feature.  plus one lexical item ("sack") and one pronunciation
("dern").  that's not a lot of "curious grammar" characteristic of the
region.

maybe blaustein was hypersensitive to (one or more of) these features,
so that a single occurrence was enough to trigger a strong sense of
place.  but i'm more inclined to think that he was just confounding
style and class with region, as people who don't share the
class-related features so often do.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)