[lg policy] US: Regional Dictionary Finally Hits ‘Zydeco’

Sat Feb 25 16:57:33 UTC 2012

Regional Dictionary Finally Hits ‘Zydeco’
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: February 24, 2012

Joan Houston Hall, chief editor of the Dictionary of American Regional
English, still remembers the day back in the late 1990s when she typed
“scrid” into Google. The word, meaning scrap or bit, was to be listed
in the dictionary as a purely New England piece of vocabulary
traceable to 1860. But suddenly there it was on the Web site of a
lathe maker in California.

“I thought, ‘Oh no! This regionalism has jumped the country,’ ” Ms.
Hall recalled recently in a telephone interview from her office at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. She e-mailed the lathe maker, who
wrote back saying he had learned the word from his girlfriend, who was
from Maine. A “nice, tight regionalism,” as Ms. Hall put it, was
saved.

Such was a particularly nerve-racking day in the life of one of
America’s most ambitious lexicographical projects, which culminates
with the publication by Harvard University Press of Volume V (Sl-Z)
next month, a mere 50 years after the project was inaugurated by
Frederic G. Cassidy, an exuberant Jamaican-born linguist given to
signing off conversations with “On to Z!”

Mr. Cassidy, who died in 2000, did not make it to the end of the
alphabet. But to scholars and language lovers the work he set in
motion is an invaluable guide to the way Americans not only speak but
also live — a homegrown answer to the Oxford English Dictionary,
served up with heaping sides of “slump” (cobbler), “turkey cheese”
(cottage cheese) and “wapatuli” (a potent Wisconsin punch).

“It’s a great and extremely comprehensive project that really shows
more than we’ve ever known before about American dialect,” said Jesse
Sheidlower, editor at large of the O.E.D., adding, “I use it every
day.”

With its capstone entry of “zydeco,” the dictionary includes nearly
60,000 terms, many of them reflecting the country’s rural and
agricultural past. But amid the pages and pages of names for
wildflowers and farm implements, DARE, as the dictionary is commonly
known, throws in enough newer terms to suggest that the state of
regional English isn’t quite as dire as laments about the homogenizing
forces of urbanization, mass media and the Internet may suggest.

>>From the beginning the dictionary was the product of cutting-edge
lexicographical science and on-the-ground research of unprecedented
scope. From 1965 to 1970, 80 fieldworkers fanned out to 1,002
carefully selected communities across the country, many of them
traveling in retrofitted Dodge vans nicknamed Word Wagons. Armed with
a 1,847-item questionnaire and newfangled portable reel-to-reel tape
recorders, they inquired about local ways of talking about everything
from the weather and kitchen items to courtship and commerce, to say
nothing of insulting terms for tramps, foreigners, loose women and
lawyers.

Informants were interviewed in log cabins and sod houses, on porches
and in bars, while they were ironing or hanging tobacco to dry or, as
in the case of a police officer in South Boston, directing traffic.
Some were reluctant to admit using a regional dialect at all. “I try
to keep my speech in the Cadillac,” a 73-year-old housewife in
Astoria, Ore., told David Goldberg, a fieldworker from New York City.

Others had darker suspicions about just what a bunch of college kids
driving around in vans painted with the logo of the University of
Wisconsin were really up to. At a picnic ground in western Kentucky in
1969, Sharon Huizenga, a fieldworker, overheard a group of men talking
about campus protesters, asking, “Why didn’t they just kill a few?”

“I thought, ‘I’m one of them,’ ” Ms. Huizenga recalled in a telephone
interview. “There were times I feared for my safety.”

Back in Madison, it took five years to enter on computer punch cards
some 2.3 million answers provided by 2,777 people, then 10 more years
to produce Volume I, published in 1985. (The editors also drew on data
from previous dialect surveys, as well as examples from books,
newspapers, diaries and letters, much of it combed through by a
network of volunteer readers.) The next three volumes appeared at
roughly five-year intervals.

The final volume took 10 years, less because of the complexities of
entries like “youse,” “you-uns” and “y’all” — “Pronouns are hard,” Ms.
Hall said — than the daunting task of sorting through the flood of
newly available digital sources.

Over the years DARE has been consulted by Broadway dialect coaches,
detectives analyzing ransom notes, scholars puzzling over a Eudora
Welty reference to “piecing” (that is, snacking) and poets looking to
mine its 170-plus synonyms for dust bunnies — otherwise known as
curds, fooskies, ghost manure, gollywogs, reebolees and “somebody
either comin’ or goin.’ ”

In the early 1990s the political consultant Frank Mankiewicz used it
to convince a Congressional committee that Donald Kennedy, then
president of Stanford University, had not billed the federal
government for a $1,200 toilet; a “commode,” in some places, is just a
chest of drawers.

“I had that entered into the record,” Mr. Mankiewicz recalled in a
telephone interview. “It succeeded in helping out substantially.”

Ms. Hall acknowledges that the extremes of regional speech are
eroding. But if it’s become harder to find 50 terms for cow pies or
buggy parts, that’s partly because people today are more likely to be
talking about fast food or traffic. (Among the dictionary’s newer
regionalisms is “slug,” used around Washington, D.C., to refer to a
commuter who lines up near high-occupancy vehicle lanes to carpool
with a stranger.) In fact, linguists say, American English actually
has more words for the same things than ever before.

“Instead of the language narrowing and becoming more standard, it’s
actually becoming more various,” said William Kretzschmar, a professor
at the University of Georgia and editor of the Linguistic Atlas
Project.

Even in the age of Twitter and Facebook, linguists say, the
interactions that most powerfully shape our speech are still local and
face to face. And while colorful terms may get the most attention, the
deepest changes in the language may be broad, collective ones that go
completely unnoticed.

Take the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, an intensifying change in
pronunciation affecting the area around the Great Lakes and upstate
New York that started manifesting itself around 1940, according to
William Labov, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania and an
author of the Atlas of North American English.

In cities like Syracuse, Chicago and Rochester, “cod” has started
sounding more like “cad” and “cut” like “caught,” for reasons that
remain deeply mysterious to linguists. (Mr. Labov thinks it’s a
long-gestating result of the Erie Canal.)

Local identity and a desire to differentiate ourselves can be
important drivers of sound shifts, Mr. Labov said. But he added, “that
doesn’t explain changes in the North, around the Great Lakes, where 34
million people are marching in the same direction, not consciously
trying to differentiate themselves from anyone.”

The line separating the North and the Midlands — an area
dialectologists define as stretching roughly from New Jersey westward
to Kansas and Nebraska — is “the deepest division in our society”
linguistically, Mr. Labov said, and it’s only getting deeper. Southern
dialect patterns, by contrast, are “shrinking slightly,” he said.

Regional differences in sound don’t necessarily relate to differences
in vocabulary, however. Mr. Labov cited a map showing 20 regional
synonym pairs taken from DARE — potluck versus carry in, or headcheese
versus scrapple — neatly strung out along the North-Midland
pronunciation line. But many other regional word maps — like those
showing where people stop drinking “soda” and start chugging “pop” or
“Coke” — have no clear relationship to differences in pronunciation,
he said.

In some small ways the regional dictionary itself — which will be
released in a digital edition in 2013 — may be helping to blur the
very distinctions it celebrates. Having survived the close call with
“scrid,” Ms. Hall is now worried it may already be too late for
“bobbasheely,” a Choctaw-derived term for “close friend” found in the
Gulf states that has been popping up in chat rooms, blog posts and
online limericks since she began citing it to journalists years ago as
her favorite word in DARE.

“I like the fact that we still have lots of regional words,” she said.
“I’d be unhappy if ‘bobbasheely’ really took over.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/books/dictionary-of-american-regional-english-reaches-last-volume.html

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