American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  Into [it] have come settlers from Tennessee and Mississippi on the east, from Louisiana on the south, and from Texas on the west.… The most striking impression which I received came from the remarkable linguistic fecundity of the region. Colloquialisms referring to motion are especially frequent and interesting. [It’s] speech abounds in distinctive and forceful similes which often spring directly from the occupations and conditions of the region.… Solecisms, improprieties and barbarisms [are numerous]. While these are confined largely to the more uneducated,… several, including may can and might could, are almost universal.

  I add a few of Warner’s examples, some of them common to the whole lowland South:

  I wouldn’t be for knowing.

  You might ought to go.

  If I’d a-wanted to went I couldn’t a-got to gone.

  I taken a liking to the boy.

  That’s the worst I ever heard of in all my put-together.

  Battle-ax. A strong man.

  Cousin. An easy victim.

  Dog, v. To lie.

  Fizz. A disturbed mental state.

  Hard-down. Pure.

  Pretty. Good; fine; excellent.

  Stone pony. A hard worker.1

  California

  “California,” wrote B. H. Lehman in Dialect Notes in 1921,2 “offers a fine opportunity to the collector of words. Its size, its peculiar history, its natural diversity, the varied industry and varied idleness of its inhabitants, and a remarkable disposition to create words, all enrich the field.” Lehman listed a number of terms, presumably of California origin, that have since come into general use, e.g., jaywalker, hang-out, pearl-diver (a dish-washer), purp, patootie (a sweetheart), and various words in -eria, -ery and -atorium.3 Spanish terms, of course, are in more frequent use than in the East, and there is an appreciable infiltration of loans from the Chinook trade-language.4 Percy Marks, who is a native of the State, tells me5 that in its northern part English is spoken “closer to as it is spelled” than anywhere else in the country. The Californians there, he says, “are not nasal; they sound the r, and the a is usually flat; they slur less than any other people; they sound every syllable.” But another correspondent says that some curious dialectal peculiarities survive among the older inhabitants of San Francisco, including a diphthongization of i that suggests vaguely the boid and goil of Brooklyn. Of this I have no other evidence.

  Colorado

  So far as I know, the only published study of Colorado speech is in a paper by Louis Swinburne.1 It is devoted mainly to the argot of cattlemen, but also lists some Indian and Spanish loans. In 1879, three years after the State entered the Union and a year after the beginning of the Leadville mine boom, a brief note on the subject was printed in the Denver Tribune,2 but this note showed nothing beyond a few specimens of the general cow country speech of the time, e.g., round-up for a social party,3 to corral in the general sense of to get,4 to go over the range for to die, to pass in one’s chips,5 to buck (of a horse),6 and cow-puncher.

  Connecticut

  Noah Webster was a native and almost lifelong resident of Hartford, Conn., and hence took a somewhat bilious view of the speech-habits of the Boston area. The fact may have had as much to do as the flow of immigration with the failure of the Boston dialect to make any progress west of central New England. The seam between it and the Connecticut speech-area, according to Hans Kurath,7 “runs straight north from the mouth of the Connecticut river through Connecticut and Massachusetts to the southern boundary of Franklin county, where it swerves west and follows the southern boundary of Franklin county to the Berkshires. Here it turns north again and runs along the crest of the Green Mountains to the northern boundary of Vermont.” The most distinctive feature in the pronunciation of the area west of this line, he adds, “is the rather general use of r in all positions, contrasting with the eastern habit of pronouncing r only when followed by a vowel.”1 But there are also other differences in phonology, and in vocabulary there are a great many, as the maps in the Linguistic Atlas of New England show. The Connecticut dialect, moving up the Connecticut river valley, not only prevailed in most of western New England, but also barged into upper New York, and from there spread westward as the basis of General American. For that reason, says Kurath, “it impresses most Americans as less distinctive than that of the seaboard.” This is not saying that it lacks local peculiarities – as a matter of fact, it still shows plenty of them —,2 but at bottom it is less aberrant than the Boston dialect, and much less than those of Appalachia and the South.

  E. H. Babbitt, one of the founders of the American Dialect Society in 1889, undertook soon afterward a study of the speech of his native region – the hilly district west of the Connecticut river, running along the Housatonic. He found that it was very close to the dialect of the Ithaca region in New York State – in other words, to General American.3 In 1905 William E. Mead and George D. Chase followed with a report on the dialect of Middleton, on the west bank of the Connecticut river, with some additions from Windham county in the northeastern corner,4 and in 1932 M. Cordelia Fuller made a brief one on that of Danbury, in the western end of the State, based upon the speech of her mother, then ninety-three years old.5

  Delaware

  In 1933 Greet made a linguistic survey of the region that its inhabitants called Delmarva, i.e., the Eastern Shore of Virginia, the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland, and most of Delaware. He found a variety of speechways, including Tidewater Southern, General Southern, and, rather curiously, even Appalachian. Indeed, he came to the surprising conclusion that the common dialect of Delmarva was closer to “the speech heard in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Madison county, Virginia,” than to any lowland Southern dialect. Even the “more formal speech” of the region, he reported, was “similar to what you hear in the towns of southwestern Virginia and of Tennessee, in Fort Worth (Texas), and in the cattle country as far west as Roswell, New Mexico.” He went on:

  There is an alternation of long and short syllables that is one kind of Southern drawl. Often the last syllable is raised in pitch (though not circumflexed, as in western Pennsylvania). The vowels are tense and fronted, and, in marked contrast to the Southern coast and middle-country dialect, there are many remarkable retroflex vowels. The consonant r is pronounced in all positions.… The broad a is very rare.

  Greet did not offer any surmise as to how and why the Appalachian speech threw this anomalous outrider into a region so different geographically and so far away. In the lower reaches of Delmarva, of course, he found that the influence of Tidewater and General Southern was rather more marked, and on the islands in the lower Chesapeake and off the Atlantic coast he encountered people speaking a dialect “related to the speech of the Guinea region of Gloucester county, Virginia.”1

  Florida

  The same influence of Appalachian is visible among the crackers of western Florida, “especially those living along the rivers which flow from the Georgia and Alabama uplands,”2 but here it is obviously due to immigration. So far as I know, no general investigation of Florida speechways has ever been made, and the literature of the subject is confined to a few brief notes. In 1916 the late F. Sturges Allen (1861–1920), then general editor of the Webster New International Dictionary, sent to Dialect Notes1 twenty-five terms picked up mainly at St. Petersburg, but subsequent research by Wentworth and others has shown that only a few of them could be called peculiar to Florida, e.g., bomb, a wad of paper soaked in kerosene, used to kindle a fire. The dialect of the Conchs, as they are called, who inhabit the Florida Keys, has been reported on by Thomas R. Reid, Jr.2 He says that they lengthen the short i to a long ee-sound, confuse w and v, drop their h’s like Cockneys, use ain’t for won’t and haven’t, and translate many Spanish idioms.

  Georgia

  The study of the speech of Georgia was begun during the 20s of the last century by the Rev. Adiel Sherwood (1791–1879), a New Yorker who had moved there for the benefit of his health. The State was then frontier territory, at leas
t west of what is now Atlanta, and the last Indians were not dispossessed until 1838. When Sherwood printed a glossary of its speech in his “Gazetteer of the State of Georgia,”3 most of the terms he listed were ignorant forms common to the whole frontier, e.g., mounting for mountain, Babtis for Baptist, bar for bear, cheer for chair, cotched for caught, oxens for oxen, and yaller for yellow. The rest came from the Appalachian dialect or from General Southern. In a few cases he was the first to record words and phrases that have not been found elsewhere at earlier dates, e.g., crazy for sickly, power of for many, mushmillion for muskmelon, and done did it, but that fact shows only that he was one of the first lexicographers in the field.4 Cleanth Brooks’s study of the dialect prevailing along the Georgia-Alabama border has been noticed under Alabama. Most of the later writings on the speech of the State are based, not on observation in the field, but on literary sources,1 but there are a few exceptions.2 The best early source is Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s “Georgia Scenes,” first published in various newspapers and brought out as a book in 1840.3

  Idaho

  There is a glossary of Idaho terms in “Idaho Lore,” one of the books published by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration,4 but nearly all of them are common to the whole West, e.g., bob-wire for barbed-wire; to high-tail, to depart swiftly, and sourdough, an old-timer. The same volume lists some specimens of miners’ argot from the Pierce City area, and of railroad men’s terms. In 1931 Paul Jensen contributed a paper on the jargon of the desert rats, i.e., harvest hands of Eastern Idaho, to American Speech5 and in 1944 Nancy Wilson Ross included a brief note on Idaho speech in her “Westward the Women.”6 Some of the terms listed by Jensen show Mormon origin, e.g., down home, meaning Utah. He says:

  Sagebrush is known locally as hickory. Dogwood is a nick-name given because of the odor of the sagebrush when wet: it resembles that of a dog’s wet coat of hair.… A forced overnight stay in the desert is sage-henning it. Silk is the euphemistic name for barbed-wire.… Rib-stickers are beans.… Bacon is turkey.… Heinze, the Shoshone word for friend, is a familiar form of address.… When some young man threatens to clean your plow he intends to defeat you in a fistic encounter.… A wish-book is the catalogue of Montgomery Ward or some other mail-order house.… The four-horse spud-digger is an implement for digging potatoes. The man who picks them from the spud-row is a spud-glommer.

  Says Mrs. Ross:

  A certain pictorial turn of phrase, peculiar to mining country, seems to be passing slowly from the language, though Idaho is still rich in the unique quality of its speech. Idahoans fork a horse when they mount it; they are often busier ’n Hattie’s flea; clear grit is to them the genuine article; and they sometimes find their fellow citizens big as a skinned mule and twice as homely. Every old town has its collection of tantalizing local personages. The wandering questioner still hears unlikely tales of Jack the Dude, Johnny Behind the Rock, Diamond-Field Jack Davis, Senator Few Clothes, and Jimmy the Harp – friends of the parlor house girls. [The girls themselves have names which] range from the imperious dignity of the Irish Queen and the Cornish Queen to the piquancy of Spanish Rose, Molly b’Damn, and the Little Gold Dollar, and finally to the more graphic appellations of Em’ Straight-Edge, Peg-Leg Annie, Velvet-Ass Rose, and Contrary Mary.1

  Illinois

  The most interesting part of Illinois, linguistically speaking, is the lush region called Egypt, at the southern tip of the State—the northernmost extension of the coastal plain which follows the Mississippi up from the Gulf of Mexico. It was largely settled, at the time of the great movement into the West, by Carolinians who came by way of Kentucky and Tennessee, and its speech still shows Appalachian and General Southern influences. An account of this dialect was contributed to Dialect Notes in 1902 by William O. Rice, a native of Wisconsin who had lived in the region since Civil War times.2 Some of the peculiarities that he noted were (a) the poverty of the vocabulary, so that one verb was used in a range of senses covered by many more in the general speech, e.g., big for all kinds and degrees of largeness; (b) the invariable use of a as the indefinite article, to the exclusion of an, e.g., a apple, a hour, a image; (c) the intrusion of y before a followed by r and u followed by sh, as in gyarden and bryush; (d) the use of a syllabic plural affix, clearly pronounced, as in nestes for nests;3 and some items of vocabulary not recorded elsewhere, e.g., explore for explosion, grab-gutter for greedy, foot-mop for door-mat, livers to designate the whole viscera, and packwater for drudge.

  The same dialect was investigated again, forty years later, by Grace Partridge Smith, also a resident of the region.4 “When we come to Egypt,” she said, “we are on the edge of the South.” Most of the words and phrases she listed were obviously of Southern or Appalachian origin, but she also added a few that Wentworth, in 1944, did not report elsewhere, e.g., frog-eye gravy, the gravy left in the skillet after frying ham;1 to look the berries, to stem them; and shotgun-house, a house whose rooms are all in one line. Jesse W. Harris, writing in 1946, reported that the predominant influence on Southern Illinois speech appeared to be Appalachian.2 Geographically, he said, the region “belongs to the Ozarks, whose foothills extend across it from east to west. Most of the pioneer inhabitants came either directly from the Appalachian highlands or by way of Kentucky and inland Tennessee.” Harris cited a number of characteristic Appalachian terms, still in wide use, e.g., feisty, lively, frisky; infare, a reception given to or by a bridegroom; fireboard, a mantel; budget, a peddler’s pack, and ham-meat, ham or bacon. He said that German colonies in St. Clair and Monroe counties and Italian settlements in the coal-mining regions have given the local speechways “their own individual peculiarities,” but he offered no examples. The diaries and other records of the early settlers of the State are probably rich in specimens of frontier speech in the 1812–1840 era, but so far they have not been explored as Albert Matthews, M. M. Mathews, George Philip Krapp, Allen Walker Read and other philologians have explored the records of colonial and post-Revolutionary days in the East.

  The study of the current speech of the State got a considerable mpetus in 1937 when Albert H. Marckwardt, of the University of Michigan, launched plans to extend the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada to the Great Lakes and Ohio valley regions, though on a scale less ambitious than that of the six volumes on New England. In a little while he had in hand field material from thirty-seven communities in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and lower Michigan, of which ten were in Illinois.1 The latter ranged from the Chicago region to Egypt. In each case the informant was a native of the community, of education that did not go beyond the grade school, and seventy years old or older. This, of course, was only a preliminary survey – undertaken, in Marckwardt’s words, “to see if the result would justify going forward on a more intensive scale.” The results were duly encouraging, and by 1943 there were records in hand from fifty communities, to which Dr. Frederick G. Cassidy, of the University of Wisconsin, presently added fifty more from that State. Unhappily, World War II and its aftermath and Marckwardt’s absence on an educational mission in Mexico interrupted the work, and a great deal remains to be done. But Marckwardt has already published some illuminating discussions of the material already in hand,2 and plans are under way to interest the State universities of the area in the project. Funds for the preliminary work were provided by the Horace H. Rackham Foundation of the University of Michigan.

  In 1904 Carl D. Buck published a study of Chicago speech,3 but it had to do with the speech of immigrant groups only. In 1935 Leonard Bloomfield published a study of American vowels devoted chiefly to those heard in Chicago,4 and soon afterward the same subject was dealt with by Morris Swadesh.5 In 1908 George E. Hoffman sent me some interesting observations of the speech of Chicago children. Among the terms he listed were Polish piano for accordion; Halstead street for anything inferior; back of the yards, of the same general meaning; to make off, to pretend; aft for afternoon; and to as a substitute for in and on, as in “Wh
en we lived to Milwaukee” and “I live over to Wayne avenue.”6 Hoffman also noted some curious pronunciations of proper names, e.g., Joán, Genóa and Devón.

  Indiana

  Indiana seems to have set the fashions in Western speech in the period between the War of 1812 and the War with Mexico, for in those days Hoosierism was used almost as frequently as Westernism to designate one of the novel and usually uncouth locutions that flowed eastward across the mountains.1 They were used freely by Edward Eggleston in “The Hoosier Schoolmaster,” first published in 1871, and a subsequent generation of Indiana novelists labored them heavily. Eggleston (1837–1902) said in an edition of his book brought out in 1899 that he was encouraged to investigate and report upon the dialect by James Russell Lowell, and that “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” was the first American dialect novel dealing with a variety of speech other than that of New England. He was born at Vevay, a small Ohio river town in the southeastern corner of the State, and spent some of his earlier years traversing it as an itinerant Methodist preacher. He saw the influence of Irish immigration upon the Hoosier dialect of his youth, and also that of immigrants from the Pennsylvania German country, but he seems to have been unaware of the even greater influence of Appalachia. Two of the German loans he noted were plunder, household goods, and smearcase.2 Seven years after “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” J. H. Beadle, also a native of Indiana, described the dialect in his “Western Wilds and the Men Who Redeem Them.” His account of it was thus summarized by John S. Farmer in “Americanisms Old and New”:3