"Big-Foot/Bigfoot Land"

[Wilson Gray]

On Nov 5, 2004, at 10:49 AM, Grant Barrett wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Grant Barrett <gbarrett at WORLDNEWYORK.ORG>
> Subject:      Re: "Big-Foot/Bigfoot Land"
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> On Nov 4, 2004, at 23:27, Wilson Gray wrote:
>> Big-Foot Land : the South; the point is that, since Southern blacks go
>> barefooted, they have bigger feet than their shoe-wearing Northern
>> relatives.
>
> The few current uses I find for this refer to a rural area meaning, I
> guess, an area Bigfoot is likely to inhabit. Do you have any cites
> older than, say, 15 years on this?
>
> Grant Barrett
>

Unfortunately, I have no cites at all. Most of the stuff that I know
that's not already in either DARE and HDAS is pretty close to
folkloric: if you grow up black, you hear your grandparents, your
parents, men hanging out on the corner or in the barbershop using
certain locutions and you learn them. In random cases, I can remember
when I first heard a given locution. Mainly, the best that I can do is
to remember the circumstances.

In this case, I met the teen-aged children of a family that had moved
to St. Louis from Cincinnati, or "Cincinnata," as they pronounced it.
When they found out that my family had moved up from the South
(according to some sources, Marshall, Texas, is the western terminus of
the old "Black Belt"), they began to tease me about being from "down in
Big-Foot Land." I remember the year as 1952, because I'm hypersensitive
to teasing and I was really, really pissed off. But I'm partially blind
in one eye and very nearsighted in the other, so it wasn't as though I
was in a position to kick ass. So, I just had to take it. FWIW, it's
from these same kids that I learned the locution, "cop a squat," a
couple of years later.

IMO, just about everything that can be found in print and reliably
dated is already in DARE and/or HDAS. For example, while I was looking
for "Big-Foot Land," I came across "busthead," with uses that I'm
familiar with and uses new to me whose accuracy I have no reason to
doubt. That simply amazed me. Till that moment, I'd assumed that
"busthead" was a local term used only in a couple of the 'hoodz of St.
Louis. It's taken me a while, but I've learned to double-check DARE &
HDAS *before* I presume to post something "new."

-Wilson Gray