American Language Supplement 2
Page 20
It abounds in negatives held to strengthen the sentence. “Don’t know nothing” is common. “See here,” says a native, looking for work, to the farmer, “you don’t know o’ nobody what don’t want to hire nobody to do nothin’ around here, don’t you?” But it is in the verb to do that the Hoosier tongue is most effective. Here is the ordinary conjugation: Present tense: regular as in English. Imperfect: I, you, he done it; we, you, they uns gone done it. Pluperfect: I, you, he, etc. bin gone done it, etc. First future: I, you, he, etc., gwine to do it. Second future: I gwine to gone done it, etc. Plural: We, you, they uns gwine to gone done it, etc. Philologically, this language is the result of a union between the rude translations of Pennsylvania Dutch, the Negroisms of Kentucky and Virginia, and certain phrases native to the Ohio valley.
In 1906 O. W. Hanley, a native of Vigo county on the Wabash (Terre Haute is its metropolis), contributed to Dialect Notes an extensive vocabulary of its speech.1 He noted some of the characters reported from Illinois by Rice,2 e.g., the invariable use of a as the indefinite article, the intrusion of y before a followed by r, and the use of syllabic plurals, and added a number of forms that Rice had not found, e.g., crickled, disabled; eye-winker, eyelash; hen-down, chicken dirt, and muckle-dun, mouse-colored, but at least nine-tenths of the terms he listed came from the common stock of the American vulgate, e.g., no-account, hist, to get religion, to fly the coop, bust, right smart and to pass the time of day. In 1912 Rollo Walter Brown followed with another list from a region apparently a little to the northward, but with much the same result.3 Here the investigation of Indiana speechways rested until 1937, when Marckwardt, mentioned under Illinois, undertook plans for his linguistic atlas of the Great Lakes area and the Ohio river valley. Marckwardt presented a report on his Indiana material to the Twenty-first Annual Indiana History Conference at Indianapolis on December 9, 1939.4 In it he said:
Indiana preserves a Southern type of pronunciation with a greater degree of unanimity than either of her neighboring States, Illinois and Ohio. Why? The answer is clear enough when we consider the census figures for 1860, and remember that this was when most of our informants, who average 80 years of age, were born. Indiana in 1860 had only 41,000 citizens who were born in New York and the six New England States, but it had 140,000 born in the four States of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina. On the other hand Illinois had 168,000 born in New York and New England and 144,000 born in the same four Southern States.
This finding was supported by a remarkable study of the dialect of a village in the north central part of the State, published by W. L. McAtee, already cited.5 McAtee is a biologist, not a philologian, but he is greatly interested in speechways, and his account of the language of his native village in his boyhood is one of the most searching and valuable reports on an American dialect ever made.1 It gives not only an extensive vocabulary, but also a conspectus of the local pronunciation and some account of grammatical vagaries. The words listed, though they belong mainly to the common stock of vulgar American, include many that are characteristic of Appalachian and Lowland Southern, and McAtee says that he found high percentages of coincidence on comparing them with word-lists from Virginia and eastern Alabama. But he also reports some curious discrepancies, e.g., the absence of to carry in the sense of to transport or escort, and of to tote, you-all, fightingest, grits, and evening (for afternoon). He lists twenty terms that are plainly of Scotch origin, thirteen loans from the French, twelve from the Dutch, eleven from Indian languages, ten from the German, and eight from the Spanish. He goes on:
The rural folk of Grant county had a varied and graphic language. Americans are said to act as if the law of life were ceaseless hurry, yet the folk take time in talking to use many similes when single words would suffice, and employ numerous even more roundabout expressions apparently out of sheer love of the picturesque. The natural man (here reflected) was not content merely to say something was big; no, it was as big as a whale or as big as all outdoors. If you inquired, “How are you?” the answer would be no monosyllable but some such expression as, “Why, jest as fine as frog’s hair,” or “If I felt any better I’d have to see a doctor.” This choice of language resulted from an underlying, imperishable sense of humor that probably was a vital factor in the people’s endurance and overcoming of the hardships of pioneer life.2
McAtee later published a ten-page supplement, in a very small edition, of local words and phrases of an indecorous character, and prefaced it with a dignified plea for the scientific study of such terms, supporting the position taken by Allen Walker Read in 1934.3 He said:
There is such a thing as serious, scholarly study of these theoretically forbidden matters. There can be discussion of the supposedly worst words (choose what one may) that will not descend below the level of purposeful and dignified etymological and ethnological investigation. For such studies raw material in the form of recorded dialects is essential, and the words which some assure us that the public cannot tolerate should be included as an integral part of language. Those who speak of public distaste in this direction are mistaken, for the words involved are of the public. Even the ugliest of the so-called unprintable Anglo-Saxon monosyllables are known to every person in the land.1
The ethnologists have long ago got rid of the prudery here denounced, but among philologians it is still all too prevalent.
In 1926 Richmond P. Bond published in American Speech a long and interesting list of similes embodying comparisons with animal traits, in use in Indiana popular speech, e.g., as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, as skittish as a colt and as tough as a mule, and to it he added a great many other metaphors of the same origin, e.g., catnap, pussyfoot, pigheaded, goose egg (zero), to ferret out, road-hog, coon’s age, bear-hug and snake-fence.2 Most of these, of course, are common American, but there are a number that I have not found elsewhere, e.g., as proud as a dog with two tails, as poor as a racehorse, as safe as a cow in the stockyards, as jealous as a cat, as sour as a billy-goat (applied to milk), as greasy as a muskrat, little buzzard (a dirty child), as tough as a biled owl, and as mean as a jaybird. By some strange oversight Bond omitted as durable as a hog’s snout and to goose; it is impossible to believe that they are unknown in Indiana, the native soil of James Whitcomb Riley and George Ade. He listed as poor as Job’s turkey, but it is not peculiar to Indiana. The DAE traces it to 1824, when it appeared in the Troy (N. Y.) Sentinel in the form of as patient as Job’s turkey. But by 1830 poor was substituted for patient, and has prevailed ever since. The simile, says the DAJE, posits “an imaginary turkey having the qualities of patience and poverty, in allusion to the qualities of Job.” But why a turkey? So far as I know, this question has never been answered. Bond listed as hot as a mink, an obvious echo of the widespread folk-belief that Putorius vison bursts with libido. McAtee notes this belief in the Supplement that I have lately noted, and says that it also prevails among the French-Canadians, whose name for the animal embodies a reference to it.
In 1939 Paul G. Brewster supplemented the Bond list in a paper in American Speech on Indiana folk-metaphors in general, and in 1941 and 1942 he followed it with a second, and a third.1 The materials for all three were gathered in ten counties in the southern part of the State, five of them fronting on the Ohio river. Some specimens:
A skinny person … has the running-gears of a grasshopper. People of stocky build are built like a depot stove. A red-head may be described by: “If you cut his hair he’d bleed to death.” … A prominent and hooked nasal organ is a cherry-picker’s nose, the possessor of which could hook it over a limb and thus support himself while he picked cherries with both hands.… An untrustworthy man is so crooked he could hide behind a corkscrew.… One who is not over-intelligent is as dumb as a mine mule in low coal, or doesn’t know sheep pearls2 from cherry-seed.… The person who is living beyond his means is said to bore with too big an auger.… Husband and wife who have separated are said to have split the blanket.… Ill health is indicated by l
ike a lead nickel with a hole in it or like I’d been shot at and missed.… The busybody is advised to mind his own business by … “Go on with your rat-killin’.” … Persons who are intimate are as thick as three in a bed.3
In addition to the Marckwardt survey for the Linguistic Atlas, Harold Whitehall and Edson Richmond, of Indiana University, are engaged upon an independent examination of the State speechways. says Whitehall:4
Its southern third belongs to what I call the transferred South, viz., its fauna and flora have more in common with those of the States south of the Ohio than with those of the Indiana plain to the north. In dialect, too, it is the transferred South. From the Ohio to a point nearly two-thirds up the State the prevailing dialect is what some authorities like to call Hill Southern,5 modified in centers such as Indianapolis with infiltrations from General American, but on the whole singularly typical of the matrix from which it originally came. A high proportion of the population, particularly in the hill districts around Bloomington, is of Kentucky origin of a few generations back, and even in localities where it isn’t the prevailing speech-type seems to have carried all before it. Along the Ohio, particularly in the river towns, there seems to be a compromise dialect that blends Kentucky Highland Southern with a form of Pennsylvania speech that must have come down the river from somewhere in the Pittsburgh region. This mixture is especially marked around New Albany.1
Iowa
“The impression is general,” wrote Frank Luther Mott in 1922,2 “that Iowa was settled from New England via New York and Ohio, and that in consequence its speech is generally Northern.” This impression turned out, on investigation, to be erroneous. Mott found that, in the early days of the State at least, its people were predominantly of Southern origin, and that their speechways showed it. Indeed, in a vocabulary of the 1833–46 era, he detected 136 examples of clear Southernisms as against but 62 examples of clear Yankeeisms. This finding was supported by the local historian, Frank I. Herriott, who came to the conclusion that Iowa “was first settled by sons of the Old Dominion, interspersed with the vigor of New England,”3 and by the Census returns of 1860, which showed two settlers born in the South to one born in the North. At a later period the State, which was admitted to the Union on December 28, 1846, received large accessions of population from the stream of European immigration, and today it shows many speech-islands in which the basic dialect has been considerably modified. One of these was described in 1929 by Miss Katherine Buxbaum,4 of the Iowa State Teachers College at Cedar Falls, who said:
My parents, German born, came to Iowa in the 60s from New York State, where they had learned their English casually.… With the project of farming in the new location they combined storekeeping, which brought them into contact with other pioneers of widely different speech traditions.… Our Pennsylvania German neighbors, really Ohioans once removed from Pennsylvania, clung rather tenaciously to foreign idiom. Still was tacked illogically to sentences that seemed complete without it. Was für (ein) lost nothing in translation, for they always said “What for seeds are you going to plant?,” or “He asked me what for books I wanted.” My parents never used these expressions, but they did translate literally the German auxiliary, sollen, in its sense of “to be reported.” It was not until I studied the modals from a German grammar and learned er sollte sagen that I understood why my mother, in reporting a bit of village gossip, had stated guardedly: “He should have said that Ernest was a thief.”
Wentworth shows that the Pennsylvania German all, as in “The butter is all,” has moved into Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Kansas and Nebraska, and I am told by an Iowa informant1 that the analogous use of the word as in “It’s in a bad neighborhood, is all” is common among Iowans “of high and low degree.” Another informant2 says that the Pennsylvania German waumus, a jacket, was in general use in Monroe county, in southern Iowa, 1914–20.3
Kansas
The pioneer of dialect study in Kansas was Dr. W. H. Carruth (1859–1924), a native of Osawatomie who was graduated from the University of Kansas in 1880, took his Ph. D. at Harvard in 1893, and occupied various linguistic chairs at the former until 1913, when he became professor of comparative literature at Leland Stanford. His first contribution to the subject was a word-list published in the Kansas University Quarterly in 1892,4 and he followed it with three others during the five years thereafter.1 He listed nearly a thousand words and phrases altogether, but many of them were marked General or credited to other States, though encountered in Kansas. A number, however, have not been reported elsewhere in the United States, among them, coddy, odd, out of fashion; boo, dried mucous; cod, a piece of deceit; girling, a girlish boy; huckleberry, indifferent, as in “He’s a huckleberry Christian”; to jimmy with, to meddle; quill-wheel, a rattletrap wagon; skin-away, a small boy; skit, a harmless lie; sloomiky, not neat; snouge, unfair; Ely, a success, as in “My name is Ely”; to horsehead, to cajole or wheedle; rally-kaboo, not up to standard; tinker-tonker, a small boy; fizzle-dust, anything very small; Jumping Jesus, a lame man; skift, a small quantity; spool-pig, a weakling; bung-out, empty; and to crow-hop, to back out.
Carruth turned up several words, later in widespread use, that seem to have been invented in Kansas, e.g., calamity-howler. He encountered others that were obviously loans, e.g., lagniappe from the French, savey from the Spanish, wic-i-up from some Indian language, and smear case, land-louper (landlaufer), waumus and all (as in “The corn is all”) from the German. He also credited the local use of hole, as in “The wind is from the north hole today,” to German example (Ger. wetterloch), and suggested that blue-sky, to indicate a bad investment, might be from the German blauer dunst. Becoming interested in these loans, he undertook an investigation of the islands of non-English speech in the State, and found them in 90 of its 105 counties. In 65 church services were still being held in foreign languages (1894), and in 41 there were schools so carried on. There were colonies of Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Hollanders, Czechs, Hungarians, Irish, Russians, Frenchmen (chiefly from Canada, but some from Switzerland), Italians and Welsh, beside Germans speaking half a dozen different dialects. Carruth made two reports on these speech-islands, each with a map.2 In the first of them he made an excellent plea for dialect study in the State. Kansas, he said:
is a peculiarly favorable field. We have here side by side representatives of nearly every State in the Union and from a dozen foreign countries.… The remark that there is no such thing as a Kansas dialect rests upon a misapprehension of what is meant by the term. In just the same way that we speak of the flora and fauna of Kansas we may speak of the dialect of Kansas.… Standard literary English is always a little behind the times. It is the stuffed and mounted specimen in the museum. Dialect is the living animal on its native heath.
Kansas has had another diligent student of its speech in Judge J. C. Ruppenthal, a native of Philadelphia who was taken to the State in childhood, and rose to be a district judge at Russell, a member of the State Judicial Council, and professor of law in the University of Kansas. His principal contributions to the subject were word-lists published in Dialect Notes between 1914 and 1923.1 He said in the preface to his first list:
There are a large number of expressions that have come from the Germans, including the Pennsylvania Germans, and the Germanic elements or German-speaking peoples of central Kansas, who are natives not only of Germany, but of Russia, Austria, Switzerland, Luxemburg, etc. Although there is a large Slav element, and perhaps a larger Scandinavian element, neither of these appears to have contributed a single word or phrase to the language of central Kansas. In addition there are some English, Irish, Scotch, Welsh, French, Belgians, Greeks, and, recently, Mexicans. Negroes are few and much scattered. Excepting Mexicans and Negroes, all other elements seem to be rapidly absorbed into the general population.
The terms listed by Judge Ruppenthal came mainly from the central part of the State and many of them were picked up in his courtroom at Russell. They included a number not since unearthed by
any of Wentworth’s authorities in other States, e.g., beany, mentally defective; black dishes, cooking utensils; to bushwhack, to borrow with intent to return; one at a clatter, one at a time; dead in the shell, worn out; to do bandies, to do stunts on a dare; fast, untrustworthy; to gig back, to back down; to go south, to be beaten; go-back land, cultivated land that has reverted to prairie; goop, a person of uncouth manners; goose heaven, the bourne of dead animal pets; to hog, to sow grain in unplowed land; kolfactor, a term of contempt; kump, a deep dish, such as a soup-plate; pass-word, a greeting; to penny-dog, to fawn on; like siz, copiously, expressively; spread-water, the overflow of a stream; dumb Isaac, a simpleton; elk-face, in which the cheek furrows run nearly parallel with the nose; to give one the flit-flaps, to make one nervous; to tit, to milk a cow; and weehaw, askew, awry. He found some curious pronunciations, e.g., alfathy for alfalfa, swullen for swollen, elder for udder, flavior for flavor, twell or twill for till, hearso for hearsay, side-draft for sight-draft, staked for stalled, fochts, with a German ch-sound, for folks; and barrow, narrow, etc., with a broad a. He encountered many German loans, e.g., blutwurst, blood sausage; schwartenmagen, souse or hog’s head cheese; to slurp, to eat noisily (Ger. schlürfen); heia, an exclamation (Ger. Herr Je or Herr Jesu, Lord Jesus); wassermucker, a Prohibitionist (Ger. wasser, water, and mucker, a bigot); schleckerig, fastidious; to take goodby; uhrgucker, a clock-watcher; mix-max, a medley or confusion (Ger. misch-masch); mush, rotten (Ger. morsch); Sauerteig, leaven; half-brother, the son of a father’s brother (Ger. halb-bruder);1 and several loans from the Yiddish, taken in through the German, e.g., mazuma, money, and tookis, the anus (Yid. tochos, the backside).2 He also found some French and Spanish loans, e.g., bayou and cabase, the head (Sp. cabeza). In a paper upon the speech of the region of which Kansas City is the metropolis, contributed to Dialect Notes in 1926, Miss Josephine M. Burnham, of the University of Kansas, listed a few other peculiarities,1 e.g., the frequent use of to get, as in “He didn’t get to go,” and of to do, as in “Do you have some ink?”. “The Kansans,” said Miss Burnham, would never say, “We have no bananas,” but always, “We don’t have any bananas.” The a, she added, was often omitted in after a while, and the the before United States, and the was inserted before most, as in “The most of the time.”