POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

Writing for Huffington Post in late summer of last year, Katherine Brooks reported on the scaling back of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), a project that was begun in 1962 that has led to the publication of six volumes of distinct words and phrases from all corners of the United States. The dictionary will continue to be updated digitally, but the fieldwork and in-person research will be discontinued.

This project has essentially had two major functions. First, it has documented the richness of American regional dialects and demonstrated the persistence of those dialects despite the uniformity fostered by mass media and the Internet. Indeed, there is an ongoing debate over whether such uniformity is eroding regional and other differences in language or actually creating a greater demand for such alternatives. Slangs, after all, exist largely to distinguish their users from others by socio-economic class, political ideology, occupation or profession, or cultural identification. Second, because a large percentage of regionalisms are colloquialisms and slang, categories of diction that would have a briefer currency even if they were widely adopted, the dictionary provides a historical record of language that has gone out of common usage even in a regional dialect.

These kinds of projects are extremely important, even if they are starting to seem increasingly anachronistic because of the ways in which we now measure scholarly achievement. And it is true that digital technologies have made some of these kinds of career-consuming projects seem inefficient. For instance, when I started graduate school, one type of major project was to create concordances of all of the words in the whole body of work produced by a canonical writer. Then, someone developed a computer program that, in conjunction with page scanning, could complete in a relatively few hours what had previously taken decades of work, involving multitudes of graduate students, to complete.

That said, regional expressions do not appear frequently in print, and so the fieldwork and in-person research has clearly been an essential part of the value of DARE. It is a reminder that digital shortcuts can still take us only so far. For all of the material now available on the Internet, it is still easy to discover its historical and other limitations.

In her article, Brooks acknowledges, and I would like to do so here, that DARE began in 1962 with a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor named Frederic Cassidy and that “from 1965 to 1970, he oversaw a team of 80 fieldworkers who traveled the country surveying thousands of English speakers and the regional sayings they held dear. From 1970 until 2013, experts in Madison used the massive amounts of survey data gathered to create an impressive, 60,000-entry dictionary now run by people like longtime DARE editors Joan Hall and George Goebel.”

She also devotes considerable space to the ways in which dialects are significant politically, socio-economically, and culturally.

She closes her article with a selection of one striking regionalism from each of the 50 states:

Alabama

twistification (noun): a dance or quasi-dance with partners in facing columns; a party at which this and similar dances are danced

Alaska

sno-go (noun, verb): a snowmobile; to travel or transport by snowmobile

Arizona

Hualapai tiger (noun): a medium to large-sized, usually black predatory bug of the family Reduviidae, also called an assassin bug

Arkansas

rusty lizard (noun): a fence lizard

California

dingy (adjective): foolish, silly, crazy

Colorado

dagwood (noun): a large sandwich, layered with various ingredients

Connecticut

glawackus (noun): an imaginary monster

Delaware

mung you (pronoun): you all

Florida

scaper (noun): a rascal; a critter, varmint

Georgia

jook (noun): a hidden or sheltered place; an isolated stand of trees

Hawaii

nani (adjective): beautiful

Idaho

whistle pig (noun): a marmot, especially the woodchuck; a ground squirrel; a prairie dog

Illinois

bube (noun): a boy; a baby

Indiana

pully bone (noun): wishbone

Iowa

storm cave (noun): cellar

Kansas

doodinkus (noun): something whose name is unknown or forgotten; a gadget

Kentucky

dry-land fish (noun): an edible mushroom, usually a morel

Louisiana

king cake (noun): a party cake, usually made for Mardi Gras season, containing an object used to determine the “king” or host of a succeeding party

Maine

tunklehead (noun): a fool

Maryland

papershell (noun): a molted crab whose shell is just beginning to harden

Massachusetts

hosey (verb): to stake a claim or reserve a right to (something); to choose; the claim so made

Michigan

ya hey (interjection): used variously as an affirmation, greeting or attention-getter

Minnesota

ishy (adjective): icky

Mississippi

crab-apple switch (noun): a large pocket knife

Missouri

eversharp (noun): any mechanical pencil

Montana

lamb licker (noun): a sheepherder or lamber

Nebraska

waddy (noun): a cowboy, ranch hand

Nevada

cow country (noun): a rural place, “the sticks”

New Hampshire

baster (noun): an extraordinarily large or vigorous example of its kind; used as a mildly derogatory or affectionate term for a person or animal

New Jersey

Jersey devil (noun): an imaginary monster; a hobgoblin

New Mexico

majordomo (noun): the overseer of a ranch or mission; a person in charge of a group or project

New York

gooney (noun): a stupid, awkward person

North Carolina

gee-haw whimmeydiddle (noun): folk toy

North Dakota

hot dish (noun): a casserole or main dish

Ohio

devil’s strip (noun): the strip of grass and trees between the sidewalk and the curb

Oklahoma

turd-floater (noun): a heavy rain

Oregon

thunder egg (noun): a geode

Pennsylvania

grinnie (noun): chipmunk or ground squirrel

Rhode Island

stuffie (noun): a clamshell (especially that of a quahog) filled with a mixture of chopped clams and other ingredients and baked

South Carolina

sand chicken (noun): a small shore bird

South Dakota

slushburger (noun): a sloppy joe

Tennessee

oodlins (noun): a great quantity

Texas

Juneteenth (noun): June 19th, celebrated as the anniversary of the emancipation of slaves in Texas on that date in 1865

Utah

snowdrop (noun): a wood anemone (here: Anemone quinquefolia) or the closely related rue anemone

Vermont

leaf peeper (noun): a tourist who comes to view autumn foliage

Virginia

flosh (verb): to spill, splash; to cause to splash up, agitate

Washington

geoduck (noun): a large edible clam

West Virginia

slicky slide (noun): a playground slide

Wisconsin

inso (interrogative, exclamation): Isn’t that so? Don’t you agree?

Wyoming

coulee (noun): a valley or depression between hills

 

Brooks’ complete article is available at: huffingtonpost.com /entry/dictionary-of-american-regional-english_us_599199fee4b08a247275c897.