query about an isogloss (pos. "anymore")

[Wilson Gray]

I'm pleased to see that "jack off," an old friend that I first met in
St. Louis in 1949 ["If your uncle Jack was stuck on a telephone pole,
would you help your uncle jack off?"], is still alive and kicking, in
print, at least, and has not been entirely swept away by the
Johnny-come-lately (to my vocabulary, anyhow) "jerk off."

-Wilson

On Jun 8, 2005, at 11:17 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      query about an isogloss (pos. "anymore")
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> We've discussed the (apparently growing) range of positive "anymore"
> on the list in the past, and it's clear that we're not just in Kansas
> anymore, or even the midwest more generally.  (There is, for example,
> the evidence of Joe Benigno, WFAN sports radio host and echt New
> Yorker, that I've cited on the list.)  But one place I *don't*
> associate it with is insular small towns in Maine, and I was thus
> struck by a couple of occurrences of fronted (and hence non-polarity)
> "anymore" in Richard Russo's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic novel
> _Empire Falls_ set in the (fictional) town of that name.
>
> Here are two examples, transcribed more or less accurately from the
> audiotape of the book:
>
> "She put the three cushions down on seats only a third of the way up
> the bleachers because anymore her feet always hurt from standing all
> day."
>
> "Anymore, all he wanted to do was jack off to the porn he downloaded
> off the internet"
>
> I see that (according to his bio for his 2004 Colby College honorary
> degree) while Russo grew up in upstate NY (also not what I think of
> as true "anymore" country--at least Rochester certainly wasn't in the
> 1960s) he got his PhD at Arizona State and has taught at Penn State
> and Southern Illinois (the last of which is definitely in the heart
> of positive "anymore"-land, while the first two may be at least
> partly in the zone) before coming to Colby (Waterville, Maine) in
> 1991.  Could it be that Russo absorbed the construction as a ruralism
> somewhere along the way, possibly in Carbondale (but maybe earlier in
> Tempe), and unconsciously put it in the mouths of characters who have
> never been out of Maine?  (Actually, as the two passages make clear,
> the "anymore"s in question are not actually *uttered* by the
> characters in question but associated with them in style indirect
> libre; at least in this novel, Russo--while not using a narrator as
> such--presents most scenes from the point of view of a particular
> character.)  Or am I wrong about Maine? I'm pretty sure not one of
> Stephen King's Maine-bound locals, whatever their Down East
> colloquialisms, have ever let a positive "anymore" past their lips,
> or I'd have noticed.
>
> Larry
>