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The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms (Facts on File Library of American Literature)

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The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms (Facts on File Library of American Literature)
by: Robert Hendrickson

The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms (Facts on File Library of American Literature)
By Robert Hendrickson

Publisher:   Facts on File
Number Of Pages:   800
Publication Date:   2000-11
ISBN-10 / ASIN:   0816041563
ISBN-13 / EAN:   9780816041565
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments viii
Preface ix
I. Whistlin’ Dixie: Southern Ways of Speech 1
II. Yankee Talk: New England Expressions 165
III. Mountain Range: Words and Phrases from
Appalachia to the Ozarks 331
IV. Happy Trails: Western Words and Sayings 423
V. New Yawk Tawk: New York City Expressions 585
VI. Da Kine Talk: Hawaiian Dialect 693
VII. Ferhoodled English: Pennsylvania Dutch Talk 721
VIII. More Odd Ways Americans Talk 751
Index 760

Preface:

This one-volume collection of all five books in the
Facts On File series on American regional expressions
is to my knowledge the only single-volume dictionary
in print on American regionalisms. Designed to
appeal to the general reader, it unites all the material in
the original five books, including the introductions
(slightly abridged). Each of the earlier five books constitutes
a separate section in the new one-volume work,
making it easier to use as a reference work than if the
20,000 or so total entries of all the books were alphabetized
together. Thus the reader wanting to track down
a Southern expression, or learn something about Southern
dialect, can turn to the Whistlin’ Dixie section,
where he or she will find an explanatory introduction
plus a large representative selection of Southern words
and phrases conveniently alphabetized in one place.
In addition, this book includes a subject index, a
number of new entries, and several new sections on
other interesting American dialects not so widely spoken
and not covered in the original series. My aim throughout
has been to fashion an entertaining book, a “reader’s
book” full of stories and interesting fact and fable about
American regionalisms that will interest both browser
and scholar, yet accurately include a large vocabulary
sample and perhaps make a few scholarly contributions
as well (including some regionalisms that haven’t been
recorded anywhere else).
Dialects, like languages themselves, are most simply
different ways people have of speaking, and there are
certainly many of them spoken in America today, no
matter how uniform American speech might seem to
have become. Midway through The Grapes of Wrath
(1939) John Steinbeck has young Ivy remark: “Ever’
body says words different. Arkansas folks says ’em different,
and Oklahomy folks says ’em different. And we
seen a lady from Massachusetts an’ she said ’em differentest
of all. Couldn’t hardly make out what she was
sayin’.” Steinbeck seemed confident that our rich,
vibrant, often poetic regional American talk would continue
to thrive, but 35 years later another master of dialogue,
with an ear second to none, warned that American
dialects might not even endure. After a leisurely trip
through the country, Erskine Caldwell reported in Afternoon
in Mid-America that not only do too many Americans
take their “point of view of events” from the
morning and evening news, but American speech patterns
also are beginning to sound like standardized network
talk. “Radio and television are wiping out regional
speech differences,” Caldwell wrote. “There is a danger
in Big Brother, in having one voice that speaks for everybody.”
Years after he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, John
Steinbeck, too, expressed a fear that American dialects
were dying, reporting his observations in Travels with
Charley (1962), an account of his attempt to rediscover
America in a camper with his French poodle, Charley, as
his only traveling companion: “It seemed to me that
regional speech is in the process of disappearing, not
gone but going. Forty years of radio and twenty years of
television must have this impact. Communications must
destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process. . . . No
region can hold out for long against the highway, the
high-tension line, and the national television.”
American dialects are holding on, though, hanging
in there, as some people might express it in their dialect;
as Steinbeck’s own Ma Joad says about her kind of
hardy people, the traveler through these States senses
that our dialects are “goin’ on—changin’ a little maybe,
but goin’ right on”; they “ain’t gonna die out.” It isn’t
likely that in the foreseeable future regional speech will
become as uniformly flat and tasteless as commercial
white bread. Local dialects are doubtless changing and
some are becoming more alike, in the opinion of many
authorities besides Steinbeck and Caldwell, but then
these dialects have never been worlds apart, and anyone
who travels widely in America can attest that they are
still very much with us. There are speech experts who
still claim, in fact, that they can pinpoint any American
to within a hundred miles or so of where he or she lives
by the way he or she talks.
While some American dialects are being watered
down by standardized network speech and the spread of
literacy and education, not to mention the movies, the
Internet, and vast improvements in transportation and
travel, none has yet been lost, and recent investigations
indicate that some of our regional dialects may well
evolve into different dialects, with many of their old
characteristics and many new ones, developments owing
to the influence of important new changes.
In the four centuries that English has been spoken in
the United States, it has undergone an infinite variety of
changes that show no sign of ending. Today these
changes are strongly influenced by the babble of new
accents heard throughout the land. Walk the streets of
any of our cosmopolitan cities such as Miami and you
will hear what British author and traveler Jan Morris
called “tongues beyond number—a dozen kinds of
Spanish for a start, a dozen kinds of American English,
too, slithery Creole of Haiti, rustic dialects of Barbados
or the Caymans, vibrant Rio Portuguese or British Honduran
English, which seems to be a sort of Swedishaccented
Australian.” Morris heard the ominous cry
“Rungway rungway!” directed at her while driving
through a poor section of Miami and thought people
were cursing her—until she suddenly realized she was
driving down a one-way street the wrong way. Many
Americans have had similar dialect interpretation experiences,
and I would guess that I have heard not dozens
but hundreds of accents on and under New York streets,
where it is often impossible not to eavesdrop. Thanks to
integration, Black English (which is a nationwide dialect
that varies from region to region) is heard in places
where blacks never ventured before. The use of Spanish
words and phrases proceeds at a rapid pace from New
York to Texas and California. The times and nature of
the language are a-changing as new ingredients pour
into a melting pot still brewing the contributions of the
tens of millions of immigrants who have arrived here
since the first boatload on the Mayflower. One is
reminded of Walt Whitman’s belief that “These states
are the amplest poem, / Here is not merely a nation but
a teeming nation of nations,” or Herman Melville’s
judgment that “We are not a nation so much as a
world.” Into the melting pot pour Hmong people from
Laos, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos,
Mexicans, Cubans, Dominicans, Jamaicans, Haitans,
Soviet Jews, Indians, and scores of other
nationalities. The enormous migration continues to alter
the makeup of American life and language. The United
States, a country that constantly reinvents itself, seems
to be doing so at a faster rate than at any time in its history.
In our big cities today, African-American schoolgirls
might jump rope while chanting numbers in
Chinese; expressions like Ciao! or See you mañana issue
from the mouths of children who have never studied
Italian or Spanish; graffiti has been spotted in such languages
as Farsi.
From America’s Little Odessas, Little Havanas, Little
Saigons, Koreatowns and all the other foreignlanguage
bastions across the country are bound to come
new words and accents that will couple with American
English and contribute to its new forms, however subtly.
There are many indications that this is happening now.
A new dialect called Spanglish already has developed.
Sociolinguist Roger Shuy of Georgetown University
believes that “an extensive modification of vowel
sounds is now taking place in the Northeast that
presages a vowel shift as dramatic as the vowel shifts of
the Middle Ages,” a period when Chaucerian English
evolved into Shakespearean English. Others say that
changes in American pronunciation and vocabulary will
be as striking as the changes that evolved between
Shakespeare’s day and the 20th century.
As we change, our speech changes. No one seems to
be able to get a collar on the rough slippery best of
American dialect, much less catch and cage the shifty
chameleon as it slouches down Route 66 toward Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, and every other city, town and hamlet
in the States, seeding and fertilizing the American
language as it has for 20 generations, making it “a new
thing under the sun,” as Steinbeck wrote to a friend
toward the end of his life, a new thing “with an ease and
a flow and a tone and a rhythm unique in all the world.”
It is no wonder that American dialect study can be no
paradigm of scholarship. But that holds true for the
dialect study of any living language, despite all our tape
recorders, computers and linguistic laboratories. Intrepid
scholars do their best with the beast, yet they can
only be infinitely patient with our infinite changing variety.
There is no general accord on the definition, but a
dialect can be broadly defined as one of the varieties of
a language arising from local peculiarities of pronunciation,
grammar, vocabulary, and idiom. In other countries
there may be such critters as “proper, standard
dialect”; in England, for example, proper standard
speech is that used by educated Londoners, variously
called London English, BBC English, the King’s English,
the Oxford accent, Southern English Standard and, most
commonly, Received Standard. But in our own growing
democracy there is no national support for any standardized
speech, neither the General American that is
used by radio and television announcers, nor, as is discussed
in these pages at some length, the so-called Harvard
accent of Boston. Americans are quite aware that
we speak in different ways from one another, even if
only subtly so, but for the most part, traditions of democratic
individualism and strong local cultural traditions

have staved off any attempt by dictionary worshipers to
foster a standard language or a national academy that
would determine correct word usages and pronunciations.
If someone says greezy for greasy, as both educated
and uneducated people do in southern Illinois,
they are no better than the educated and uneducated
speakers who pronounce greasy as greecy in the northern
part of that state. Linguist Raven I. McDavid Jr. told
of how his stodgy college professors, literally interpreting
the pronunciations indicated in Merriam-Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary, fifth edition, criticized his educated
South Carolinian pronunciation of the word
American; McDavid pointed out that there are at least
five regional pronunciations, one as good as the other,
these including the second syllable with the vowel of
hurry; with the vowel of hat; with the vowel of hit; with
the vowel of hate; and with the vowel of put. There is no
all-American pronunciation of American.
Similarly, many provincial Americans voted against
what H. L. Mencken sarcastically called “the caressing
rayon voice” of the politician Wendell Willkie because
the Hoosier pronounced “American” as Amurrican;
chose Herbert Hoover over Alfred E. Smith because
Smith said raddio; got Henry Wallace in trouble south of
the Potomac in 1946 for using the term the common
man, which is regarded there as a term of contempt.
Some Spokanians voted against John F. Kennedy
because he pronounced their city’s name Spokane (to
rhyme with cane) instead of Spoke-ann. Geraldine Ferraro’s
New York accent may well have cost her votes in
her bid for the vice presidency.
One dialect is distinguished from another by pronunciation,
vocabulary and grammar (including word
construction, syntax and slang). Besides regional or geographical
dialects, dialectologists recognize social or
class accents, including Black English and blue-collar
speech; most regional dialects include two or three such
social dialects. Little work has been done on the dialects
of age and sex groups; old people, for example, often use
words and pronunciations outmoded in a region, and
women tend to use words like lovely and darling more
than men, who are generally more blasphemous and
employ fewer modifiers and more slang. One study
shows that where women more often say trousers, china
and houseguests, men say pants, dishes and visitors.
Young people, on the other hand, are even more imitative
than TV newscasters in aping the speech of the more
successful among them, such as popular singers, who, in
turn, have been tremendously influenced by Southern
white or black speech patterns.
Word pronunciation is an excellent way of identifying
American regional accents, but regional vocabulary
is clearly the most interesting method. The different
regional names for objects is among the most entertaining
aspects of dialectology. Collectors have found, for
example, that the famed hero sandwich of New York,
named for its heroic size (not for Charles Lindbergh or
any other hero), has at least 11 different names in other
regions. In New Orleans, similar huge sandwiches on
split loaves of French (not Italian) bread are poor boys
(po’boys) because they were first given to New Orleans
beggars in the late 19th century. Heroes are called hoagies
in Philadelphia and thereabouts, submarines in
Pittsburgh, grinders in Boston (you need a good set of
grinders to chew them), torpedoes in Los Angeles,
Cuban sandwiches in Miami, wedgies in Rhode Island,
Garabaldis (after the Italian liberator) in Wisconsin and
bombers and rockets in other places.
In my own travels, I have found basic differences in
common food names over distances of less than 100
miles. In New York City, for example, small red-skinned
potatoes, the first of the season, are generally called new
potatoes. Travel less than 100 miles east, out to Long
Island’s North Fork, and these sometimes become salad
potatoes, probably because they are used in potato
salad. The signs pitching “Lobster and Salt Potato—
Only $6.95” along the Boston Post Road in Connecticut,
less than 50 miles away across Long Island Sound,
puzzled me until I learned that the red-skinned potatoes
are so called because they are cooked in salted water.
Other discombobulating twists in the way Americans
talk include the various words used regionally for
the kiddie seesaw, which can be, among other terms, a
teeter board, a tippity bounce, a cock horse, a dandle, a
hicky horse, a tilting boar and a teeter totter. A sofa,
similarly, can be a couch, a settee, a davenport, an
ottoman, a settle and a daybed, while the living room
where it sits can be the big room, the front room, the
parlor or the chamber. The candy flecks, usually chocolate,
that ice-cream cones are dipped into are called
sprinkles in New York, but jimmies, for some unknown
reason, in New England; in other locales they are called
nonpareils, sparkles, dots, shots and even ants. Soda in
New York is pop in the Midwest, tonic in Boston and
dope in the South. American kids playing hide-and-goseek
often shout Olly-olly-oxen-free or Home-free-all
when beating the “It” to base, but Olly-olly-in-comefree
is a variation. Ohio kids shout Bee-bee-bumble-beeeverybody-
in-free and Montana kids for some reason, or
perhaps no reason, shout King’s X!
Even when Americans use the same words, regional
pronunciations add variety. In the state of Washington a
skid row is a skid road; in Salt Lake City you praise the
Lard and put the lord in the refrigerator, while in the
Bay Area of California et cetera is essetera, a realtor is a
realator, hierarchy is high arky and temperature is tempature.
There are also at least 175 different ways in which
people describe heavy rains, from It’s raining cats and
dogs (national) to It’s raining pitchforks and angle-
worms (Michigan), It’s raining pitchforks and barn
shovels (Maine) and It’s raining pitchforks and bullyearlings
(Texas, of course). A heavy rain is called a
dam-buster in Alabama, a leak-finder in Wisconsin, a
million-dollar rain (beneficial to crops) and ditchworker
in Illinois, a tree-bender in Massachusetts, a
sewer-clogger in Michigan, a mud-sender in California,
a gully-maker in Ohio, a gutter-washer in Georgia, a
stump washer in South Carolina and a gully-washer in
33 states. Other terms include a goose-drowner, a toadstrangler
and a duck-drencher.
American dialects, specifically the New England
dialect, first came to the attention of British writers at
about the time of the American Revolution. Most
observers pointed out the relative freedom of early
American English from dialects, remarking that the differences
in speech among Americans were far less than
those found in Britain and other countries. This can be
attributed mainly to the mobility of Americans, who
were constantly mingling with each other and homogenizing
one another’s speech. The Reverend John Witherspoon,
the Scottish president of Princeton who coined
the word Americanism, remarked in 1781 that the
American common people, “being much more unsettled,
and moving frequently from place to place . . . are not
so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology.”
Another explanation for the early comparative uniformity
of American speech was suggested by a London
editor in 1783: “[People] had assembled in America
from various quarters [parts of Great Britain] and in
consequence of their intercourse and intermarriages,
soon dropped the peculiarities of their several provincial
idioms, retaining only what was fundamental and common
to them all; a process which the . . . universality of
school-learning in North America must naturally have
assisted.”
But, subtle though they might be and slight compared
to those of many other languages, there were
regional dialects in America at the time these writers
insisted there were none. The New England and Southern
dialects had already been acknowledged, and
dialects in other regions were fast developing prior to
1800. As time passed and remote regions of the country
were settled, differences became more pronounced. By
1861, William Howard Russell of the London Times,
reporting on a state dinner given by Abraham Lincoln a
few weeks before the start of the Civil War, could
observe: “There was a Babel of small talk around the
table, in which I was surprised to find a diversity of
accent almost as great as if a number of foreigners had
been speaking English.” There were several reasons for
dialects developing faster at this time, principally that
forms of transportation and communication were still
crude and slow, making for less contact between people
from diverse areas than when areas of settlement were
closer together. Though most Americans could easily
understand each other, regional language was more distinct
during the first half of the 19th century than at any
other time in our history. With improved forms of transportation
and communication these differences began to
iron out again toward the end of the 20th century, but,
as amply attested here, American dialects did not disappear
and are not by any means dying.
Estimates of the number of present-day American
dialects range anywhere from a basic three (New England,
Southern and the all-inclusive General American)
to 24 or so, and hundreds more if one includes the relatively
small number of unique words and ways of speech
heard solely in individual towns and cities.
American dialects originated in several ways, but
the traditional theory holds that they were ..

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