the curious grammar of Ohio

[Page Stephens]

Hey youse guys.

Try to find that in southern Ohio though it is common enough in Cleveland
and Buffalo, N.Y.

The problem is the misidentification of a geographical/political area with
cultural formations especially since such formations have a name which
people know with no idea of the difference in the dialects and
socio/cultural existents within them.

All too many years ago I wrote an article based on research outside the US
in which I described my experience in trying to tell people where I was
from.

Centralia, Illinois never worked because none of my inquisitors knew
Centralia and damned few of them had ever heard of Illinois.

I did discover that most of them had heard of Chicago so I ended up telling
them that I was born some 250 miles south of Chicago and that Chicago was in
Illinois which was located in the middle of the US.

I argued in my article that this was sort of a general rule which applies
not only abroad but also in the US since most people have only the vaguest
idea of geography until you give them some frame of reference and that as a
result you have to give them some reference which they are able to
recognize. In my own case in spite of the fact that Centralia is closer to
Mississippi than it is to Chicago and much more culturally and dialectally
related to Mississippi than it is to Chicago, Chicago works while
Mississippi does not.

What occurs in these kinds of conversations is that the participants
negotiate until they find a common frame of reference and then go from
there. In other words Ohio is well known but damned few people have any idea
of  the cultural diversity of the state and as a result they tend to reify
Ohio as if it was a single cultural area. No one who is conversant with the
politics of Ohio or for that matter Illinois would make this simple error
but since politics tend to be determined by the nature of the political
subdivisions in which they exist outsiders tend to be unaware of them.

On a larger scale the same thing occurs in terms of nations and as a result
such entities as France, the UK, Russia, Spain, etc. are considered to
cultural wholes since people tend to reify such states not because they have
any cultural unity but because they are nations which are politically
unified. The worst  notion along these lines is the concept of the "nation
state" which is based on the entirely mistaken idea that states are or even
worse should be organic wholes based on cultural unity.

This is total nonsense, of course, but how many wars have or are being
fought over this silly notion.

The most curious grammar I have run across is probably my own since I love
learning and speaking different dialects from Strine to Arkansawyer
(northern not southern) and often for the fun of it lapse into southern
Illinoisan just to confuse those who listeners. My natural pronunciation
these days is probably broad northern Midwestern though as a
matter of pride I always pronounce the word wash "woish" just to keep them
off guard. In addition as an English friend of mine tells me I use more
English words than any American he knows and as a result  every time one of
his friends fails to know what a word means he calls me up in order to see
if I know it. And about 90 percent of the time I not only know it but use it
in everyday conversation.

This brings me to the point of this already overlong missive which is that I
tend to deal with both linguistic and cultural differences not in terms of
the differences per se or even when they first occurred but as the outcome
of socio/cultural processes so that I can make generalizations about them.

My late friend and mentor Julian Steward once asked Alfred Kroeber after he
had taken his first year of graduate courses which consisted entirely of
area  (note the use of the word area) studies that the facts were fine but
how did you explain them?

I have spent the last 40 years of my life trying to explain them.

Page Stephens

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter A. McGraw" <pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 4:35 PM
Subject: Re: the curious grammar of Ohio


> ---------------------- Information from the mail
> header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Peter A. McGraw" <pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: the curious grammar of Ohio
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Anymore, I often wonder about that curious Ohio grammar, too.
>
> Peter Mc.
>