[Lexicog] pluff mud (was plough mud)

[David Frank]

Thank you, to all who responded. This has been interesting, and I have learned something, both about the particular phrase "pluff mud" and about methodology. I will try to summarize what I have learned, and I will pass on this information to the Charlestonian who originally asked me whether "pluff" was an older pronunciation of "plough."

First, I will preface this by saying that a perception around Charleston and the lowcountry area of South Carolina (which is pretty much the only place where this term is used, as far as I can tell) is that in the term "pluff mud," "plough" is the traditional spelling, and "pluff" is a modern, "phonetic" spelling. (I'm using too many quotation marks here.) Here is why I say that:

1.       The person who first asked me about the term thought that that was the case. She believed that "plough mud" got its name because it was used in plowing/ploughing--as a fertilizer, I suppose.

Here are some other things that I found through a web search:

2.       "The spirits urged me to roll down the windows and breathe the musk-laden drug of the marsh. The scents of plough mud and rotting marsh life filled my senses like a warm shower of rare perfume. " From a novel entitled Sullivan's Island: A Lowcountry Tale, by popular author Dorothea Benton Frank (no relation to me, though I do have an Aunt Dot who was a Frank before she got married.) Note that Sullivan's Island is in the Charleston area.

3.       "The shores of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers at Charleston were muddy and swampy— still are at the southern entrance of the Inland Waterway. This swamp shore was called plough mud [pronounced pluff] and the boys had to dig into the mud with their paddles and slide the bateaux along to gain solid ground. Remember how terrible that mud smelled? And the Intercoastal still does! " From the web site www.duckworksmagazine.com/03/r/excerpts/bcsc/.

4.       "What’s 'plough mud'? you ask. I never knew what it was until one day when I was driving down Calhoun Street in Bluffton. I was confronted with a new art gallery that had cleverly adopted the phonetic spelling 'Pluff Mud' as the name of its shop. Imagine that. Ten years in Bluffton and I didn’t know what plough mud was! When Lowcountry natives write of the fragrance of the marsh, they are describing the experience of plough mud. Todd Ballantine describes the fragrance as 'essence d’estuary.' The mud is the build up of soil washed off the land, detritus from marsh creatures, decayed marsh grass, and sand transported in by the tides." From the web site http://blufftonbreeze.com/201003/_Bluffton-Environmental.php. Note that Bluffton is further down the coast from Charleston, but is still in the lowcountry area of South Carolina.

The responses to my query have convinced me that "pluff mud" is the older spelling, and that it didn't get its name from plowing/ploughing.

Here are some things I learned:

1.       Rudolph Troike pointed out that one can do a search in the Dictionary of American Regional English at http://dare.wisc.edu/?q=search (though I have a hard time making sense of the results).

2.       The English word "plow/plough" was probably never pronounced as "pluff."

3.       One might get slightly different results searching with Bing rather than Google. This way Dick Watson found a 2005 book entitled Shamrocks <http://www.amazon.com/Shamrocks-Pluff-Mud-Southern-Charleston/dp/1419613170/>  and Pluff Mud: A Glimpse of the Irish in the Southern City of Charleston, South Carolina.

4.       As Rikker Dockum demonstrated, "date restricting within Google Books can help pinpoint when each spelling might have come into use." He found more than 20 hits for the spelling "pluff mud" before 1900, and the only spelling of "plough mud" that he found up to 1950 was one book published in 1898 and republished a couple of times after that.

5.       Pluff mud was used for growing rice, but probably wouldn't have been used for other farming because of the salt content.

6.       This term apparently had not previously gotten the attention of the American Dialect Society, but Benjamin Barrett has passed it on to them now and they are working on it. (I would be interested to know what they come up with. I was once a member of the ADS, back in my school days, but no longer am.)

7.       "Pluff" is a Scottish word, and Crockett points out that it and "pluff mud" are documented in the OED.

8.       As Richard Gravina pointed out, the Dictionary of the Scots Language at www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/ has an entry for "pluff" that says that the word can be "applied to anything of a dry, soft, crumbly or spongy texture which disintegrates easily into dust, specif. a rotten mushroom (Sc. 1825 Jam.), a pear or the like which looks edible but is rotten inside."

I still think the semantic link is tenuous, but am convinced now that the term "pluff mud" does not come from the English word "plow/plough," and that the spelling "pluff mud" is older than "plough mud," and that it does date back to a Scottish word meaning something like "puff." There really isn't anything light, airy or puffy about pluff mud, and as Donald Frantz and others have pointed out, there seems to be some kind of onomatapoeia or sound symbolism going on.

-- David Frank

 

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