American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  The linguistic situation in the region around Chesapeake Bay is very complicated.… The area frequently has its own distinctive terms, which are not found at all in the adjoining territory. For instance, head horse is often used for lead horse on the Eastern Shore and at the head of the Bay, and hother horse occurs in three communities. Whetter and whet instead of whetstone are used in a few places on the Eastern Shore. Catch-all for the Southern lumber-room is most frequent in Delaware, but also occurs in two communities on the Western Shore of Maryland. Hind legs or hind feet for haunches and prim up instead of primp up are found on both sides of the Bay, the former as far west as Carroll county, the latter frequently on the Eastern Shore. The Bay region also preserves some of the relic terms which have been found along the Virginia and North Carolina coast.

  The great institutions of learning of Maryland appear to take but little interest in the curiously diverse and instructive speech of the State. Dr. Kemp Malone, of the Johns Hopkins, has concerned himself to good effect with American speech in general1 but not with that of Maryland in particular, and J. Louis Kuethe, of the same university, has published several brief notes on the latter2 but is mainly devoted to place-names and topographical terms. The Johns Hopkins participates officially in the field-work for the projected Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Atlantic States, supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, but apparently its participation is more formal than active.3 I have long had it in mind to attempt a vocabulary of Baltimore speech in the 80s and 90s, for a number of terms that were in common use there and then do not seem to have been noted elsewhere, e.g., Araber, a street huckster; to arab, to go huckstering;4 front steps, the steps before a dwelling-house, usually in those days, of marble; and Yankee jumper, a sled for girls, with the platform raised 9 or 10 inches above the runners, and the runners curved upward in front. Leapfrog was always called par, and the word garden was almost unknown: it was always either the backyard or frontyard, or simply the yard. The outdoor privies that still survived in most backyards were called postoffices, and the men who cleaned them at intervals operated an O.E.A. (i.e., odorless excavating apparatus). The grades in school were designated first reader, second reader, etc. The best public room of a house was always the parlor. The street before it, at least for purposes of play, was out front.

  The sweetmeats bought by children from the little stores which then hugged every schoolhouse had names that are now forgotten, e.g., nigger-baby, shoe-string, and cow-flop. A nigger-baby was a small, hard, black licorice candy cast in the image of a colored baby. It sold at four or five for a cent. A shoe-string was a length of softer licorice candy, perhaps a foot or more long. It sold for a cent. A cow-flop was a round, flat cake made of flour and molasses, with some ginger added and ground cocoanut mixed in. No well-mannered child of the time would dare to refer to an actual cow-flop, but the term was tolerated when applied to the cake, and the resemblance between the cake and the droppings of a cow was acknowledged with winks. Another delicacy of the young was Washington pie, which was about two inches thick and was vended in blocks about two inches square. It was made of stale pies, ginger-cakes, etc., ground up and rebaked. The price was a cent a square. All the schoolhouse stores sold spit-blowers, which were thin cylinders of tin. A bad boy who owned one would buy a cent’s worth of putty, and let fly with small pellets of it at schoolma’ams, blind men and the aged. Dried peas were also used for this purpose. In the schoolroom he concealed his spit-blower in one of the legs of his knee pants, with the lower end caught in his long stocking. When one was discovered by the teacher, the principal was called in, and the offender was rattaned. The same stores sold many other things now forgotten – for example, colored tissue for making kites and passapool (i.e., Sebastopol) flags.1

  Massachusetts

  How Massachusetts is divided between the Boston dialect and General American has been described in the section on American dialects in general. An enormous amount of material about both forms of Massachusetts speech is to be found in the six volumes of the Linguistic Atlas of New England, and there is more in the files of Dialect Notes and American Speech and in the phonological and lexicographical studies already mentioned in dealing with New England. Cape Cod alone has produced a considerable literature, and Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard have produced scarcely less. The first Cape Cod study of scientific pretensions was published by George Davis Chase, of Wesley an University, in 1903;1 it was followed by two others in 1904 and 1909.2 Further reports have come from Herbert W. Smith,3 Henry J. James,4 and Mrs. Wendell B. Phillips.5 Chase’s first paper was based on the speech of his parents, both born and brought up at West Harwich, a small village on the south shore of the Cape, and it represented the dialect prevailing c. 1850. He said that this dialect was already changing when he wrote, chiefly under the admonitions of the schoolmaster, who frowned upon such pronunciations as chimley for chimney and cramberry for cranberry, and the use of ar instead of er in serve, perfect, serpent, nervous, etc. The r was usually dropped before consonants, oi became ai, the flat a was used before l, there was no y-glide before ew, and w itself often disappeared, as in forrard for forward and ekal for equal. The verb to be was inflected as follows:

  There was a tendency to make strong verbs weak, e.g., growed, drawed, busted, dinged, drinked, freezed, teared and catched,2 and verbs remaining strong had the same forms for the past and perfect participle. Elderly people were called Aunt or Uncle, and a married woman was known by her own and her husband’s given names, e.g., Hope Austin (Hope, the wife of Austin Baker). Many of the terms in the local vocabulary came from the sea, e.g., aback, at a standstill; gangway, any passage way; to get to windward, to gain an advantage; to go by the board, to be lost; to keel up, to be laid up by illness; ship-shape, in good order, and stern foremost, backward. Other localisms listed by Chase were bitch-hopper, a provoking woman; blunderbuss, a blunderer; to buckle, to run fast; chicken-flutter, excitement; ginger-leap, wintergreen; lug-wagon, a four-wheeled farm vehicle; meet-up, a, crony; quuf, the letter G; slobber-chops, a child or animal that scatters its food; and tuckout, a fill of food. In his second and third lists he added chowder-head, a stupid person; fiddle-a-ding, a trifler; gentleman passenger, a well-behaved boy; harness-cask, a barrel for salt meat; hog age, a boy’s awkward age; Lady Haley, a well-behaved little girl; to limp-to-quaddle, to hobble; to talk underground, to speak indistinctly; yeppit, a small boy; boiled yarn, a dish made of brown bread crusts boiled in sweetened milk and water; grave-stones, prominent front teeth, and Jack White, a shirttail. Smith dealt with more recent locutions, and listed, among others, facultized, versatile; cow-storm, rain without wind; nail-sick, applied to wood so rotten that it won’t hold nails; to fly-blow, to depreciate; narrow-gutted, stingy; fumble-heels, a clumsy person; and to rootle, to root (as a hog). To these, in 1924, James added cod-head, a knee-length boot; hog’s back son-of-a-bitch, boiled codfish with scraps of pork, and fat cat, leapfrog.

  Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, the two islands lying to the southward of Cape Cod, were both settled before 1650, and, like the Cape itself, show some survivals of archaic speech. The sea has played a salient part in their history, and its terms supply their dialect with frequent pungent metaphors, e.g., poor craft, a sorry figure of a man; long-sparred, having long limbs; down by the head, bowed by age or infirmity; fair wind, good fortune; astern the lighter, tardy; and to square the yards, to pay a debt. There is some animosity between the two islands, as is shown by the nicknames applied to the people of one by those of the other – Scrap Islander for a Nantucketer on Martha’s Vineyard, and Old Town Turkey for a citizen of Martha’s Vineyard on Nantucket.1 In 1915 William F. Macy and Roland B. Hussey published a book on Nantucket which listed a large number of localisms.2 Some of them were Cape Codisms, but others were words and phrases that have not been recorded elsewhere, e.g., to clip in to, to make a call at; Coff, a native of Cape Cod, and, by extension, any other off-islander; cornstarch airs, formal manners; flink, a good t
ime; gallied, frightened; gam, a social visit; huddle, a dancing party; polpisy, awkward, countrified; quint, an old maid; to shool, to saunter; to sit in the butter-tub, to marry well; stingaree, a persistent person; to tivis, to wander about; wadgetty, fidgety, and to wilcox, to lie awake at night.3 In 1918 Byron J. Rees published a similar list of Martha’s Vineyard terms, gathered at Chilmark the year before.4 It included current, in good health; flake, any section or piece; flared, deranged mentally; hickory, rough, tempestuous; pinkletink, a young frog; to studdle, to stir up, and turkler, a man of great energy.5

  The large literature upon the so-called Boston accent has been noticed in the preceding pages, and there is no need to return to the subject here.1 In 1943 George L. Trager published a posthumous paper on its phonology by Benjamin L. Whorf, an amateur linguist of high attainments,2 but that paper is too technical to be summarized for the lay reader. There has been some infiltration of loanwords in the sections of Massachusetts invaded by non-English-speaking immigrants, but if any study of them has ever been published I have not encountered it. Mr. Charles J. Lovell, an acute observer of speechways, tells me3 that in the New Bedford and Fall River area two Portuguese loans, cabaca, head, and lingreesa, sausage (Port, linguica), are in common use. He also says that bobo, apparently from the Canadian French, is widely used for chamber-pot. The children of the immigrants reciprocate by speaking a magnificent vulgar American. Mr. Lovell offers the following specimens:4

  After supper my dad taken off his shoes and lain down on the couch.

  He gotten hell for what he done.

  You must have been brang up in a pigpen.

  His mother should of learned him not to pick the snots from his nose.

  I known her since she was a little girl.

  Mrs. Robinson given me those pants what Phil outgrown.

  She shouldn’t of letten him touch her.

  I been down there myself.

  He helt on to Watkins and broughten him down.

  He use to work for me but I fire him.

  Teacher say I an’ him should of went too.

  They all know he ain’t no good.5

  Mrs. R. H. Hoppin, of Belmont, Mass.1 calls my attention to a number of locutions apparently peculiar to the Boston region, e.g., tonic for soda-water, drymop for dustmop, dry-cleansing for dry-cleaning, spa for a sandwich and ice-cream shop, and apparatus for fire-engine, and Mr. Howard S. Russell reminds me2 that the English moor survives on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, and that common, green and brook continue in use elsewhere in the State.

  Michigan

  Michigan is within the Great Lakes-Ohio river area being investigated by Albert H. Marckwardt and his associates, mentioned under Illinois and Indiana. They began by confining their inquiry, save for Sault Ste. Marie, to the lower peninsula of the State. I know of no other study of Michigan speech save a brief note on its phonology, published in 1934.3

  Minnesota

  All the writers upon the speech of Minnesota call attention to the influence of non-English dialects upon it, especially Swedish, Dano-Norwegian and German. In American Speech in 1946 there was an interesting account, by Mrs. W. L. S. Mackintosh, of Kampala, Uganda, East Africa, of the language of her native village of Hawley, in the northwestern part of the State, about thirty miles from the North Dakota border.4 Mrs. Mackintosh’s people, on her father’s side, were Scots who came to the United States by way of Nova Scotia, and on her mother’s side, half northern Irish, a quarter Scottish and a quarter Pennsylvania German. “I grew up,” she said, “with Scandinavians for the most part, with a sprinkling of English who were early settlers, a few later-arriving Scotch-Irish from Ontario, and a very few Irish and Germans who came later.” She went on:

  All our Norwegian, Swedish and Danish friends and neighbors without exception said “Can I go with?” instead of “Can I go with you?” … They also said, in asking if a certain person was included in, or accompanied others at any gathering, “Was he with?”… Both of these expressions were exclusively Scandinavian, and others in town never used them except in quotation marks.… News to the Scandinavians in Hawley always stood in the Herald.… My mother often said when she lost or mislaid something, “I wonder what went of it.” … I vaguely considered it Canadian, but none of the other Canadians used it.… We always said, as the town still does, “Who-all was there?” and “What-all did you do?” Many of the Irish also use who-all and what-all.1 As children we asked, “May we have a piece?,” which meant a between-meal snack of bread and butter, usually superimposed with brown sugar, jelly, peanut-butter or anything available.… We said in sleighing talk, “Let’s slug around this next bend,” whipped up the horses and skidded with as wide a sweep and swoosh as possible around the curve.… My younger sister caught me out in the use of reuse for rinse in recent years, but … we never heard rench.… A-going sounded quite foreign to us, as did that-a-way, both of which were used by a Nebraska family which moved into our community.… We wore tossle caps, certainly never tassel caps, and there were tossles on the ends of bath-robe cords, but on articles of furniture or other garments they were tassles.… Children in Hawley studying for confirmation in the Lutheran church under the tuition of the minister always did, and still do, read for the minister. I have heard my Swedish sister-in-law say hundreds of times that she would now cook the coffee.… To carry on in Hawley and generally among Scandinavians in Minnesota means to make a fuss or a scene, as in “She carried on until we were ashamed of her.” … Chores always carried with it a flavor of the barnyard.… The Scotch-Irish commonly said, “I don’t dast” for “I don’t dare.” “I dasn’t” was far more rarely heard.

  Here we have linguistic legacies from all over. Dast is New England, but is also common in the South. To stand (in the newspaper) is used in Pennsylvania. Wentworth finds piece in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and Ohio, and it appears in William Dean Howells’s novel of early Ohio, “The Leatherwood God.”2 That-a-way, like this-a-way, is ancient in English, and was probably that-there-way originally. Rense is from New England, and appears in “The Biglow Papers.” Tossle ranges from Maine to Louisiana. To carry on has been in almost universal American use for more than a century, and probably originated in the West: the DAE traces it to 1828, but it is not recorded in England until 1856. Nils Flaten called attention to to go with so long ago as 1900:1 he suggested that it was a translation of the Norwegian “Vil du gaa med?,” but it may-have come into Minnesota speech from the German, in which the analogous form is “Gehst du mit?”2 Says William J. Griffin, of the State Teachers College at St. Cloud:3

  In central Minnesota we are well acquainted with the influences of Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, German, and Irish. But the characteristic of the common speech that impressed me most is the pronunciation of aunt. The vowel (not at all diphthongized) is unbelievably broad. The closest analogy I can suggest is to flaunt. It is the only word which is given this broad value, so far as I have observed.

  Sinclair Lewis, a native of Minnesota, says that the rustic speech of the State turns creek into crick and muskrat into mushrat. Wentworth presents evidence that the former is not common in Maine, in the South, or in Appalachia, but he finds mushrat in New England, in Appalachia, in up-State New York, and in Wisconsin. Several localisms of the Twin Cities have been reported by William Randel,4 e.g., resort in the restricted sense of an individual establishment in a resort community, boulevard in the sense of the grassed area between curb and sidewalk on a city street, and to go to the lake in the sense of to go upon any holiday, whatever one’s designation. Minnesota lies within the area of the Marckwardt survey of Great Lakes speech, and the study of its dialect has been undertaken by Harold B. Allen, of the State university. It will probably be some years, however, before the field-work for this investigation is completed.

  Mississippi

  In 1893 a young Mississippian named H. A. Shands, seeking his doctorate at the State university, chose the local speechways as the theme of his dissertation.5
“No previous study of this special subject,” he said in his introduction, “has, within the knowledge of the writer, been made,” nor has there been any other, so far as I know, since. Shands did his work under the direction of the Rev. William Rice Sims, Ph.D., and had the aid of Dr. H. Schmidt-Wartenberg, professor of modern languages at the university. He gave attention to speech on three levels – that of the educated whites, that of the illiterate whites, and that of the Negroes. He omitted “the majority of the provincialisms that are noted as common by Bartlett or other lexicographers,” and made an effort to disregard “those words and expressions that have been introduced into Mississippi by foreign immigrants.” What he found was in substance what is now usually called Lowland Southern, though, as usual, it showed traces of Appalachian influence. Some of his observations follow:

  1. The final a was converted into i, as in Minnesoti and sofy.

  2. The palatal glide after a and before r, as in gyarden, cyar and cyarpet, appeared in the speech of all illiterates, and in that of educated immigrants from Virginia and South Carolina.

  3. Among the illiterates a was flat almost invariably, as in ask, answer, last, grass, calf, half, and even aunt, palm and calm. Papa became pappy.

  4. The flat a before r was broadened, so that barrel became bahr’l and bare became bahr. In radish, carriage and carry it became short e.

  5. The long e in teat, Negro, fear, here and steer became short.

  6. Negroes, but not whites, used haid for head, aidg for edge, sont for sent, and sot for set.