dialect dictionary fiction (and spongers)

[Laurence Horn]

>from the Stanford Report (faculty/staff newspaper), 6/8/05, "2005
>Wallace Stegner Fellows named":
>
>New Stegner Fellows in fiction
>
>...Rita Mae Reese of Madison, Wis., holds degrees from Florida State
>University and the University of Wisconsin.  Reese will work on a
>novel about a woman doing fieldwork for a regional dictionary in
>Appalachia.

Wonder if she worked for DARE, as a number of grad students in
linguistics at UW have done.  If so, she would certainly know whereof
she writes.

One work her protagonist is not likely to encounter is "sponger" (as
applicable to resourceful dolphins rather than annoying humans).  A
WOTY candidate?
====================================
The New York Times
June 7, 2005 Tuesday
Science Desk; OBSERVATORY; F3
by Henry Fountain

Just What Mother Ordered

  Bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay in western Australia have an
unusual way of searching for food. Some of them break off pieces of
sea sponge and wear them over their beaks like sheaths. These
''spongers,'' almost all female, then use their beaks to probe the
sea grasses looking for small fish and crustaceans.

  Researchers have concluded that this foraging-- an extremely rare
case of a marine mammal's using what is considered a tool -- does not
have a genetic or ecological basis. Rather, they report in The
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it is a cultural
behavior, passed down from mother to daughter.

  ''We can make a very strong case that this is culturally
transmitted, socially learned behavior,'' said the lead author of the
study, Dr. Michael Krutzen of the University of Zurich.

  These dolphins are difficult to observe in the wild because the
waters are infested with sharks, said Dr. Krutzen, who conducted the
research with Dr. Janet Mann of Georgetown University and other
scientists while at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

  But the researchers noticed that females who did not use sponges
foraged in the same areas as spongers. So the practice is not a
function of habitat or other ecological conditions. (Spongers find
  better food, however, presumably because their beaks are protected
and because they can probe deeper into the grasses and sandy bottom).

  A genetic analysis using tissue samples from 185 dolphins, 13 of
them spongers, showed that it was highly unlikely that sponging was a
heritable trait. Other genetic analyses showed that the female
spongers were closely related, all descended from one original
sponger, an ''Eve'' who must have existed fairly recently. She
originated the practice and taught it to her daughters, who in turn
passed it on.

  Just one male sponger has been observed, Dr. Krutzen said. Why
aren't there more? Sponging tends to be a solitary activity that
requires a lot of time, he said, and bottlenose males are often too
busy chasing members of the opposite sex. ''If you were a male
sponger, you wouldn't get any females,'' Dr. Krutzen said.

GRAPHIC: Photo: Females in this family always wear sponges when
dining out. (Photo by Janet Mann)
===========================
So now it's not just Elaine who has to decide if her evening's dinner
companion is spongeworthy...

Larry