American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  5 Private communication, Oct. 18, 1939.

  1 The Bucolic Dialect of the Plains, Scribner’s Magazine, Oct., 1887, pp. 505–12.

  2 Reprinted in the St. Louis Republican, Oct. 22, 1879, p. 3, and in American Speech, Dec. 1941, p. 269.

  3 Traced by the DAE to 1880.

  4 Traced to 1860.

  5 The DAE’s earliest example is dated 1888.

  6 Traced to 1864.

  7 Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England; Providence (R.I.), 1939, p. 8.

  1 p. 19.

  2 Says Odell Shepard in Connecticut Past and Present; New York, 1939, p. 255: “The thing about these peculiarities that most delights me is that most of them are not peculiar to the State at large, but to special districts, often to single towns.… Despite the levelling influence of highways, automobiles, radio and public education, the idioms and pronunciation of Connecticut people remain as testimony to that extreme localism, that strong independence and segregation of the towns, which has characterized us from the beginning.” An example is muggs, a herb cellar, reported and discussed by Donald Barr Chidsey, of Lyme, in American Speech, April, 1947, pp. 154–55.

  3 List of Words From Western Connecticut, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Part VI, 1893, pp. 276–78; The Dialect of Western Connecticut, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Part VII, 1894, pp. 338–43. Babbitt announced in the latter paper that he proposed to resume discussion of the subject in a book on American pronunciation, then in preparation, but apparently that book was never completed.

  4 A Central Connecticut Word-List, Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Part I, pp. 1–24.

  5 Word List From Danbury, Conn., Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Part V, pp. 283–84.

  1 Delmarva Speech, American Speech, Dec., 1933, pp. 56–63. Some further observations on Delaware speech will be found under Maryland. Both States are included in the area to be studied for a proposed Middle Atlantic section of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada.

  2 Florida and Tennessee, by Joseph Leon Hicks, American Speech, April, 1940, p. 215.

  1 Vol. IV, Part IV, p. 302, and Vol. IV, Part V, pp. 344–45.

  2 A Philologist’s Paradise, Opportunity, Jan., 1926, pp. 21–23.

  3 First published in 1827. A second edition omitted the glossary, but in a third, published in 1837, it was restored and extended.

  4 His vocabulary is reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931, pp. 118–21.

  1 For example, A Word-List From Georgia, by J. H. Combs, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part V, 1922, pp. 183–84. This is also true to some extent of Brooks’s paper.

  2 For example, Tales of the Okefinokee, by Francis Harper, American Speech, May, 1926, pp. 407–20, and The Way We Say It, North Georgia Review, Winter, 1941, pp. 129–30.

  3 Longstreet (1790–1870) was born at Augusta, Ga. He was, at various times, a lawyer, a judge, a journalist, a Methodist parson and a college president. Georgia Scenes had a great success in its day, but its author is said to have been ashamed of it in his old age.

  4 Caldwell (Idaho), 1939, pp. 241–45. The State director was Vardis Fisher.

  5 Desert Rats’ Word-List From Eastern Idaho, Dec., 1931, pp. 119–23.

  6 New York, 1944.

  1 Some Idaho terms, chiefly from the miners’ argot of the Coeur d’ Alenes region, are in A Word List From Northwestern United States, by Benjamin H. Lehman, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part I, 1918, pp. 22–29.

  2 The Pioneer Dialect of Southern Illinois, Vol. II, Part IV, pp. 225–49.

  3 Such plurals are common in the English dialects. Wright even records a triple form, nesteses, in Essex.

  4 Speech Currents in Egypt, American Speech, Oct., 1942, pp. 169–73.

  1 Miss Smith suggests that frog-eye gravy is analogous to hush-puppy. It is and it isn’t. In most parts of the South hush-puppy means cornmeal cooked in the fat in which fish has been fried, with maybe onions added, and Mr. Davenport Edwards tells me that the term in this sense has got as far as California (private communication, Oct. 31, 1945). But Wentworth presents evidence that bush-puppy h also used to designate various other forms of fried mush, without fish. In the mountains of Tennessee, as in Egypt, it is applied to ham gravy.

  2 The Dialect of Appalachia in Southern Illinois, American Speech, April, pp. 96–99. See also his Pioneer Vocabulary Remains in Southern Illinois, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Dec., 1945, pp. 476–80.

  1 Wisconsin has since been added, and it is proposed to add Kentucky and a part of Ontario later on.

  2 For example, Middle English ǒ in American English of the Great Lakes Area, Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, Vol. XXVI, 1941, pp. 56–71; Middle English W A in the Speech of the Great Lakes Region, American Speech, Dec., 1942, pp. 226–34, and The Survey of Folk Speech in the Great Lakes Area and Ohio River Valley, Studies in Linguistics, April, 1943, pp. 2–3.

  3 A Sketch of the Linguistic Conditions of Chicago, Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, Series I, Vol. VI.

  4 The Stressed Vowels of American English, Language, June, p. 97.

  5 The Vowels of Chicago English, Language, 1935, pp. 148–51.

  6 Private communication, Aug. 2, 1938.

  1 The DAE traces Hoosierism to 1843. For Hoosier see Chapter X, Section 4.

  2 Eggleston’s Notes on Hoosier Dialect, by Margaret Bloom, American Speech, Dec., 1934, pp. 319–20.

  3 London, 1889, p. 304.

  1 Dialect Words From Southern Indiana, Vol. III, Part II, pp. 113–23.

  2 The Pioneer Dialect of Southern Illinois, lately cited.

  3 A Word List From Western Indiana, Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Part VIII, 1912, pp. 570–93.

  4 It was printed in the Indiana History Bulletin, Feb., 1940, pp. 120–40.

  5 Rural Dialect of Grant County, Indiana, in the Nineties; Chicago, 1942; followed by Additional Dialect of Grant County, Indiana; Chicago, 1943; Grant County, Indiana, Speech and Song; Chicago, 1946; two supplements to the last, 1946.

  1 The village was Jalapa, near Marion, and McAtee was born there in 1883. It lies on the Mississinewa river, a branch of the Wabash. McAtee was educated at the University of Indiana, and has occupied important posts with the United States Biological Survey, the National Museum, and the Fish and Wildlife Service, which last he now serves as technical adviser. He is the author of more than 700 professional papers, mainly on birds, insects and plants.

  2 Cf. Supplement I, p. 235.

  3 An Obscenity Symbol, American Speech, Dec., pp. 264–78.

  1 Supplement to the Rural Dialect of Grant County, Indiana, in the ’Nineties; Chicago, 1942, pp. 1 and 2.

  2 Animal Comparisons in Indiana, American Speech, Oct., 1926, pp. 42–58.

  1 Folk Sayings From Indiana, Dec., 1939, pp. 261–68; More Indiana Sayings, Feb. 1941, pp. 21–25; Still More Indiana Sayings, April, 1942, pp. 130–31.

  2 i.e., droppings.

  3 In Provincial Sayings and Regional Distributions, American Speech, Feb., 1943, pp. 66–68. Raven I. McDavid, Jr., showed that many of the words and phrases collected by Brewster are also to be heard in the South. In Notes on Indiana Speech, American Speech, Oct., 1944, pp. 204–06, V. E. Giblens printed interesting glosses upon some of them. In Dauncy, American Speech, April, 1945, pp. 151–52, Allen B. Kellogg discussed the Indiana use of that word, which is not peculiar to the State, but is recorded by Wentworth for Maine, California, Pennsylvania, and nearly all the States of the South. In Jive Talkers Can’t Sneeze at Old-Time Hoosier Chin Music, Indianapolis Star, Dec. 21, 1945, William L. Toms said: “In pretty nearly every second or third generation Hoosier is an outcrop of atavism, as evidenced by the occasional use of words and terms peculiar to his ancestors.” I am indebted here to Miss Nelda A. Weathers, of Washington, D. C. For other aid I am obliged to Professor John B. Nykerk, of Hope College, Holland, Mich., and to Captain John Jamieson, of New York City.

  4 Private communication, Oct. 20, 1946.
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br />   5 i.e., Appalachian.

  1 Raven I. McDavid, Jr., says in Dialect Geography and Social Science Problems, Social Forces, Dec., 1946, p. 170, that “the area settled predominantly from the South follows an irregular line a little south of the fortieth parallel in Ohio and Illinois, and a little north of it in Indiana.” The fortieth parallel runs between Indianapolis and Muncie.

  2 A Word-List From Pioneer Iowa and an Inquiry into Iowa Dialect Origins, Philological Quarterly, July, 1922, pp. 202–21; An Additional Word-List From Pioneer Iowa, the same, Oct., 1922, pp. 304–10.

  3 Whence Came the Pioneers of Iowa?, Annals of Iowa, Series III, Vol. 7.

  4 Some Iowa Locutions, American Speech, April, pp. 302–04.

  1 Mr. C. F. Ransom, of the Des Moines Register and Tribune: private communication, July 8, 1939.

  2 Mr. William J. Griffin, of the State Teachers College at St. Cloud, Minn.; private communication, Sept. 26, 1937.

  3 The DAE derives waumus from the Dutch wammes, a jacket, but Kramer’s Nieuw Engelsch Woordenboek shows that the more usual form of the word is wambuis. Wentworth says it is from the Pennsylvania Dutch, i.e., German. Webster 1934 adopts the Dutch etymology, and relates the word to the Old French wambais. Marcus Bachman Lambert, in his Dictionary of the Non-English Words of the Pennsylvania-German Dialect; Lancaster, 1924, gives the form wammes, and so does J. William Frey in his Simple Grammar of Pennsylvania Dutch; Clinton (S.C.), 1942. Lambert marks it “dialectal German.” In standard German wamme means paunch. Warmus, a form produced y folk-etymology, is recorded by Webster. Whatever the source of the term, it seems to have spread through the United States from Pennsylvania. Wentworth records it for Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, West Virginia, Wisconsin and central New York.

  4 Dialect Word-List, Vol. I, No. 2, Oct., 1892, pp. 95–100.

  1 Dialect Word-List No. 2, Kansas University Quarterly, Vol. I, No. 3, Jan., 1893, pp. 137–42; Dialect Word-List No. 3, the same, Vol. VI, No. 1, Series B, Jan., 1897, pp. 51–58; Dialect Word-List No. 4, with Paul Wilkinson, the same, Vol. VI, No. 2, Series B, April, 1897, pp. 85–93.

  2 Foreign Settlements in Kansas: A Contribution to Dialect Study in the State, Kansas University Quarterly, Vol. I, No. 2, Oct., 1892, pp. 71–84, and Vol. III, No. 2, Oct., 1894, pp. 159–63.

  1 A Word-List From Kansas, Vol. IV, Part II, 1914, pp. 101–14; Vol. IV, Part V, 1916, pp. 310–331; Jottings From Kansas, Vol. V, Part VI, 1923, pp. 245–46. Prefaced to the last paper was a note saying that Judge Ruppenthal was “preparing another extended list of expressions found current in Kansas,” but it never appeared in Dialect Notes, which was mainly given over, during the years following, to printing the third volume of R. H. Thornton’s American Glossary.

  1 In 1946 Dr. H. B. Reed, head of the psychology department at the Fort Hays Kansas State College, undertook a survey of the 2732 grade school pupils of Ellis county, which adjoins Judge Ruppenthal’s Russell county to the westward. The Natoma Independent thus reported his findings on Aug. 8: “Test results showed 1616 had speech defects of one kind or another.… The most frequent was the German accent, found in 1226, or three out of five. Instead of saying ‘We have pigs with big teeth’ they say ‘Vee haf picks wit bik teet.’ ” Other speech defects were in pitch, voice quality, and distinctness.

  2 In Russian Words in Kansas, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part II, 1914, pp. 161–62, Ruppenthal listed some Russian terms in use among German immigrants who came to Kansas by way of the Volga region, where they had been settled since 1760, e.g., ambar, a granary; arbus, a watermelon; brosch, abandoned land; gofta, a short jacket for women (R. kofta); klapot, a lawsuit or other trouble; knout, a whip; natschelnik, a court official; pachshu, a garden plot; plodnik, a carpenter; sotnik, a constable, and steppe, a prairie. But these term? have not got into the common speech.

  1 Some Observations Upon Middle Western Speech, Vol. V, Part X, pp. 391–96. Many of her examples were taken from the Kansas City Star, the principal newspaper of the region. “The collection,” she said, “might almost – but not quite – be called ‘Notes on Kansas.’ ”

  2 A Note on the Kansas Language, in We Liberals; New York, 1936, pp. 76–84.

  3 The first Federal census, in 1790, showed 32,211 males and 28,922 females.

  4 But Boone’s so-called autobiography, published in 1834, was actually written by John Filson.

  1 Kentucky Words and Phrases, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Part II, 1890, pp. 63–69. Fruit followed this with Kentucky Words, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Part V, 1893, pp. 229–34.

  2 A Word-List From Barbourville, Ky., Vol. III, Part VI, pp. 45–57.

  3 An Eastern Kentucky Dialect Word-List, Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Part VII, 1911, pp. 537–40.

  4 Folk Speech of Pine Mountain, Kentucky, American Speech, Oct., 1946, pp. 188–92.

  5 Swarp and Some Other Kentucky Words, American Speech, Dec., 1946, pp. 270–73.

  6 Dudley did not mention the pronunciation. In most part of the United States the common form is cartoon.

  7 Other Kentucky word-lists, chiefly from the Appalachian area, are in Early English Slang Survivals in the Mountains of Kentucky, by Josiah H. Combs, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part IV, 1921, pp. 115–17; Kentucky Items, the same, pp. 118–19; Kentucky Pioneers, by Atcheson L. Hench, American Speech, Feb., 1937, pp. 75–76, and A Word-List From the Mountains of Kentucky and North Carolina, by Cratis D. Williams, Publication of the American Dialect Society, No. 2, Nov. 1044, pp. 28–31.

  1 Boston, 1859, p. xx.

  2 Notes From Louisiana, Vol. I, Part II, pp. 69–72.

  3 New Orleans Word-List, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part IV, 1916, pp. 268–70.

  4 Supplement I, pp. 319–20. Wentworth finds that it has extended to Alabama, Mississippi and Texas.

  5 Louisiana, Vol. IV, Part V, 1916, pp. 346–47; Terms From Louisiana, Vol. IV, Part VI, 1917, pp. 420–31; Louisiana Gleanings, Vol. V, Part VI, 1923, pp. 243–44. The editors of Dialect Notes seem to have had some difficulty with Routh’s name. They made him Rouse on the cover of Vol. V, Part VI, and Rontt inside. Born in Virginia in 1879, he has held various professional posts in Georgia since 1918. He is a Ph.D. of the Johns Hopkins.

  1 Major William D. Workman, Jr., tells me that the compensatory er for oi is also heard, but that it is “softer and less nasal” than in Brooklyn. He says that oyster “is not so much erster as uh-ister.” Private communication, Aug. 20, 1945. For the Brooklyn dialect see under New York.

  2 The Settlement of the German Coast of Louisiana, by J. Hanno Deiler, German American Annals, Jan.-Feb., 1909, pp. 34–63; March-April, pp. 67–102; May-June, pp. 123–63; July-Aug., 179–207.

  1 Notes From Louisiana, by Pearl Hogrefe, American Speech, Feb., 1934, p. 79.

  2 Some specimens are given in Older English in Louisiana, by Herbert L. Hughes, American Speech, Dec., 1936, pp. 368–69.

  3 All of these are from the glossary in the New Orleans City Guide, in the American Guide Series; Boston, 1938, pp. 407–10. This glossary gives minon for cat instead of the minnie listed by Routh, and papillote for curl-paper instead of his papiette.

  4 The Dialect Atlas of Louisiana: a Report of Progress, Vol. III, No. 2, June, 1945, pp. 37–42.

  1 Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England; Providence (R.I.), 1939, p. 17.

  2 A Word-List From Eastern Maine, Vol. III, Part III, pp. 239–51. This was followed by the same authors with A Word-List From Aroostook, Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Part V, 1909, pp. 407–18. After Carr’s early and lamented death in 1908 Chase continued alone with Lists From Maine, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part I, 1913, pp. 1–6, and Maine, Vol. IV, Part II, pp. 151–53.

  3 These maps, however, stop short at the latitude of Bangor.

  1 Two Word-Lists From Roxbury, N. Y. and Maine, by Mrs. F. E. Shapleigh, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part I, 1913, p. 55; Rural Locutions of Maine and Northern New Hampshire, by George Allan England, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part II, 1914, pp. 67–83; Maine List, by E. K. Maxfield, Dialect Notes,
Vol. V, Part IX, 1926, pp. 383–90; Notes From Maine, by S. E. Morison, American Speech, June, 1929, p. 356; Yankee Notes From Eliot, Maine, by Wendell F. Fogg, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Part II, 1930, p. 90; More Notes on Maine Dialect, by Anne E. Perkins, American Speech, Feb., 1930, pp. 118–31.

  2 Boston Transcript, Dec. 2. This paper was republished in Colloquial Who’s Who, by William Abbatt; Tarrytown (N.Y.), 1924, Vol. I, pp. 101–07, and again in American Speech, Dec., 1927, pp. 134–41.

  3 Maine Dialect, American Speech, Nov., pp. 76–83.

  4 A Record From Lubec, Maine, and Remarks on the Coastal Type, American Speech, Aug., pp. 397–403.

  1 See also One Man’s Meat, by E. B. White, Harper’s Magazine, Dec., 1940, pp. 107–08. I am indebted for useful suggestions to Mrs. Isaac Gerson Swope, of Wayne, Pa.; to Mr. Ray C. Faught, of Baltimore, a native of Maine; to Dr. George W. Blanchard, of New York City; and to Mr. John B. Wentworth, of Tenants Harbor, Maine.

  2 For Boucher see AL4, p. 35, n. 1. More about him is in Boucher’s Linguistic Pastoral of Colonial Maryland, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Part VII, 1933, pp. 353–60, and in Additional Comment on Boucher, by M. M. Mathews, in the same issue of the same journal, pp. 360–63. See also Jonathan Boucher: Champion of the Minority, by Robert G. Walker, William and Mary Quarterly, Jan., 1945, pp. 3–14.

  3 For Witherspoon see AL4, pp. 4–7, and Supplement I, pp. 4–14.

  1 See AL4, p. 203.

  2 Pumpion or pompion was the original English form of the word, traced by the NED to 1545. Pumpkin is traced by the DAE, in American use, to 1654.

  3 The DAE’s earliest example of banjo is dated 1774; it may not antedate Boucher. The word is derived from the Spanish and Portuguese bandore, first recorded in English use in 1591.

  4 A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, by Richard Ligon; London, 1657, and The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, by Bryan Edwards; London, 1793. I take these references from Read.

  5 William Eddis praised the Maryland pronunciation in his Letters From America; London, 1792, p. 59. I am indebted here to Mrs. Lucy Leigh Bowie.