7. Both races used tarrier for terrier, thrash for thresh, tarrible for terrible and trassel for trestle.
8. The Negroes alone used bres for bless, gwine for going, cyo (with a long o) for cure, heaben for heaven, gib for give, sabe for save, debl for devil and smoove for smooth.
9. He found r “so seldom pronounced in the middle or at the end of words by any class that its pronunciation forms an exception.” Such exceptions, he noted, were found only “in a class of very illiterate whites,” and their occurrence constituted “the most distinguishing feature of the real po’ white trash dialect as contrasted with the Negro dialect.”1
10. In Negro speech th at the beginning of words often became d or f, and in other situations, d, f, b or v. Examples: den, dat, dis, froo (through), nuffin (nothing), anudda (another), breaf (breath), and the before-mentioned smoove for smooth. But they sounded th in otha (other), thrash, thumb, thunder and thout (without).
11. All persons of the verb to be, in the present tense, indicative, were “involved in inextricable confusion” by Negroes, who used I is, I are, You is, We am, etc.
12. As compensation for the use of bile for boil, boil was used for bile.
13. There was a confusion between ever and every, as in “he hit ever man in the crowd.”
14. Very was often used in a sense opposite to its usual meaning. “In spoken discourse its meaning depends entirely on the tone in which it is uttered. If it is pronounced quickly, without any special stress, it means small extent, to a very moderate degree. Thus, sometimes, when a thing is said to be very good it is meant that the thing is moderately good, or not so good after all; e.g., if someone were asked whether a dog is a good one or not, and should reply, ‘Well he is very good,’ it would in all probability be meant that the dog was not entirely good, but that he had some good qualities. When the necessity arises for using very in its emphatic or intensifying sense Mississippians nearly always employ some other term, a few of which I shall give: real, real down, mighty, quite, tarnation, awful, uncommon, monstrous, rattling; all of which are used as adverbs when taking the place of very.”
“The dialect of the illiterate whites of the extreme backwoods,” said Shands, “possesses a characteristic that cannot be adequately represented by written characters—a kind of drawling, nasal twang.” Most of the localisms he listed were loans from Appalachia, e.g., to hone for, to pine for; jewlarky, a sweetheart; to projick, to trifle; jodarter, anything superior; and we-uns, but he also gave a few that have not been reported elsewhere, e.g., barbershela, a friend (borrowed from the Choctaw and used only in the south central part of the State); to bip into, to attack; jimmy-jawed, with protruding lower jaw; to give him scissors, to lash with the tongue; elected with, provided with; to be due one a compliment, to owe an apology; to chaw tobacco more than onc’t, to repeat; brief, dressed up, and to fisticuff, to fight. Rather curiously, he did not mention you-all.
Missouri
Missouri, said Allen Walker Read in 1932,1 “presents a welter of speech-groups, with jumbled overlappings and complex origins. The early French occupation has left its mark (very distinctly in some speech-pockets), the Southern and Northern influences have jostled, immigrant races such as the German have contributed, the Negro has brought his characteristic speechways, and geographical factors have split the State even further: the distinctive river regions, the southeastern swamplands, the Ozarks, the plains near Kansas, the corn country near Iowa. This variety makes, for dialect study, an unlimited wealth.” Basically, Missouri speech is predominantly Southern, but most of the early schoolmasters were New Englanders, and they left many traces of their tutelage. The first formal study of the speech of the State, by R. L. Weeks, was published in 18931 and dealt with the dialect of Jackson county, the county-seat of which is Independence, the home-port of the Hon. Harry S. Truman. Unhappily, the “peculiar words and usages” presented by Weeks were all common to various other parts of the country, and some of them were nearly universal. Nor was there much that was singular in his list of “pronunciations and grammatical points.”
D. S. Crumb, who followed him in 1903 with a lengthy study of the speech of the southeastern part of the State,2 unearthed a great deal more that was specially Missourian, e.g., to run a blind calf over, to impose on; buckshot land, poor clay soil; to cheep, to mention or hint at; clay-bank, cream colored, applied to a horse; to cut the comb of, to humiliate; door-shutter, a door; enthralled, in debt; glut, a large wooden wedge; groundhog case, an irremediable situation; like a hog to war, sideways; meals, a meal, used in the singular; to pack guts to a bear, to engage in a low occupation; to rehaul, to overhaul or repair; slack-jaw, impudent language; snurl, a gnarled place in a log, and spouty and water-sobbed, water-logged, none of them found elsewhere by Wentworth. Crumb found many Southernisms, e.g., the y-glide before ar, you-all, evening for afternoon, and hit for it in emphatic situations. He also found a large number of Appalachianisms, apparently migrant from the Ozarks.3 Perhaps the best report upon the dialect of eastern Missouri, along the Mississippi, is to be found in the works of Mark Twain. He knew it thoroughly and recorded it lovingly, especially in “Huckleberry Finn.”4
Montana
In 1915 Marie Gladys Hayden published in Dialect Notes a list of words and phrases in use in the Judith basin of Montana.1 It showed nothing that was not common to the speech of the West, and most of it came from the lingo of cattlemen or lumbermen, e.g., soogan, a sheep-herder’s blanket, and flunkey, a camp waiter. A later list was included in “Montana: A State Guide-Book,”2 but it was likewise largely confined to cattlemen’s terms, with some miners’ terms added. Burke lists a “Glossary of Common Speech in Montana,” published at Missoula in 1938, but I have been unable to find a copy of it.3
Nebraska
The fact that Dr. Louise Pound was born in Nebraska and has spent nearly all her life there4 offers sufficient assurance that the speech of the State has not gone unstudied. She made her first report upon it, in fact, so long ago as 1905,5 and thereafter she discussed it frequently, and used it as raw material for her numerous invaluable papers on American speechways in general. Her preliminary note upon the phonology of the dialect was an excellent treatise in miniature on the whole American vulgate, at least north of the Potomac-Ohio line and west of the Mississippi, for it described characters encountered everywhere, e.g., rassle for wrestle, ketch for catch, deef for deaf, kittle for kettle, deestrick for district, histry for history, fella for fellow, spose for suppose, pisen for poison, somewheres for somewhere, acrost for across, warsh for wash, chimbley for chimney, shumac for sumac, quanity for quantity, strenth for strength, prespiration for perspiration, hunderd for hundred, ellum for elm, Babtis for Baptist, bust for burst, cuss for curse, rine for rind, interduce for introduce, sassy for saucy, neked for naked, shet for shut, crick for creek, lozenger for lozenge, Gahd for God, Febuary for February, and probly for probably. Not many of the forms she listed were peculiar to Nebaska: its speech on all levels, indeed, comes very close to the norm of General American, and she noted that loans from non-English languages were confined to the areas of relatively dense immigration. Nor was there any evidence in the vocabulary, as she presented it, of specifically Southern influence: it was fundamentally Northern, but the Northern of the West, not of New England.
Dr. Pound printed a second report on it in 19111 and a third in 1916.2 In both cases her material was gathered largely by the students who had begun to cluster about her at the University of Nebraska, and nearly every one of the locutions listed was turned in by at least six informants, “generally from different sections of the State.” The lists included many additions to the store of common American, e.g., dreen for drain, neuraliga for neuralgia, snoot for snout, atheletic for athletic, secetary for secretary and incidence for incident, but also some pronunciations not general elsewhere, e.g., the over-careful frag-grant and extra-ordinary. Some of the terms smelled of the college campus, but there were also a number of curious localisms o
f wider currency, e.g., brashy, having a tendency to fall sick;3 dabimit, an exclamation of annoyance; to horn, to annoy; hymaviffa-of-the-bivavva, a person of great importance;4 jigger, a cry of warning; lick-dab, gravy; to puss, to pout or sulk: skite, an unlikeable person; kadoowy, any substance of unknow nature; skeehaw, crooked or out of place; squeechy, a term of eulogy, and wug, a knot of hair. These later lists showed some German influence, e.g., in the use of longsome for long; in the substitution of by for to, as in “I go by the house,” and in the use of all for finished or exhausted, as in “The milk is all.” The popularity in the 1910–20 era of the pseudo-Russian suffix, -ski, was reflected by darnfoolski, devilinski, dumbski and smartski.1
Later studies of Nebraska speech have been made by E. P. Conkle, Melvin Van den Bark, M. A. Burwell, Mamie Meredith and Erma V. Grill, some of them students of Dr. Pound. Van den Bark, who afterward collaborated with Lester V. Berrey in preparing the best dictionary of American slang so far published,2 gave his first attention to the contemporary speech of the Sandhill section of the State, a barren and forlorn area of 20,000–odd square miles in the north central part,3 but he afterward turned to that of the pioneers of 1854–90.4 There was, however, considerable overlapping, for he found that the Sandhillers, in their remote settlements, preserved many locutions of an earlier day. They were, indeed, simply the last wave of pioneers, and they had sought to tame a wilderness that their predecessors had rejected. Their talk, as Van den Bark reported it, indicated that most of them had come from north of the Ohio river, but in it there were not a few terms that seemed to be of their own invention. A few examples:
Blow-out. A hole in the sandy soil, made by the wind.
White-cap. A hill showing many blow-holes.
Choppies, or chop-hills. Low hills bare of grass.
Let-down. A place where the barbed-wire of a fence may be lowered to let cattle through.
Jump-over. A crude bridge of planks.
Corduroy bridge. One made of windmill piping set in cement.
Dead-man. A weight fastened to a barbed-wire fence to hold it down.
Jerker. A corn-husker.
Jew peddler. One selling overalls, sewing-thread, cheap jewelry, etc.
Prune peddler. One selling dried fruits, extracts, tea, coffee, spices, etc.
Catalog woman. A wife acquired through a matrimonial agency.
Music-box. A gayly painted house or shanty.
Tailer. A cow so undernourished that it must be assisted to its feet by twisting its tail.
Thunder-pump. The green heron, commonly known elsewhere as the shite-poke.5
Juice, v. To milk a cow.
Howl. A high wind.
On pump. On credit.
Hay-wire, v. To mend anything.
Van den Bark’s studies of the speech of the Nebraska pioneers were based upon a diligent search of the literature describing the later stages of the great movement into the West, and his four papers make a valuable record of the speechways of the whole trans-Mississippi region. The foundations of those speechways were laid by the hunters and trappers who preceded the settlers, and they were enriched by the argots of the Army and the early cowmen, “The pioneers,” says Van den Bark, “came from everywhere – from the East, the South, from England, Ireland, Germany, Bohemia, Holland, and the Scandinavias. The words and expressions they coined and the words to which they gave new meanings were generally simple, honest and direct. The talk of the cowboys … still lives vigorously on ranches, [and is] used as slang by townsmen who refuse, sometimes, to believe that there are still soddies1 … in Nebraska.” The other investigators mentioned have made lesser contributions to the speech-lore of the State. Conkle, in 1924, published a list of curious interjections from its southeastern part, e.g., edads, forevermore, ginger blue bird, oh girlie, heavenly day, oh poodle, whiff, woman alive and the German donner und blitzen.2 Burwell, in 1931, listed some locutions from the South Dakota border,3 e.g., bummy, spoiled, slightly ill; misbobble, a mistake, and to nip, to move with the shaky steps of old age. Miss Grill, in 1933, added explosion, a dance; to partake of fresh air, to take a drink, and Sandhill pavement, a sandy road covered with hay, to Van den Bark’s list of Sandhill words and phrases. Vernon L. Hoyt, of the Columbus (Neb.) Daily Telegram, sends me three more curious phrases, not peculiar to the Sandhill country,4 to wit, to get a good scald on, to do any job well;5 to make a lot of bag, applied to any act or process which seems to portend an ominous event,6 and dinner’s about, dinner is about ready – the last apparently a loan from the German or Dano-Norwegian.
Nevada
Nevada has too small a population, scattered over too large an area, to have developed anything properly describable as local speechways. In part, its people speak the argot of miners and in part that of cattlemen; for the rest, they use General American. There are word-lists of both the argots mentioned in the guide to the State prepared by the Writers’ Project of the WPA.1
New Hampshire
As we have seen under Connecticut, the line separating the speech of the Boston area from the Eastern sub-species of General American runs northward from the Berkshires along the crest of the Green Mountains. This leaves all of New Hampshire within the Boston area, but there are local differences sufficiently marked to give its dialect a considerable individuality. For one thing, the State is predominantly rural, not urban, and hence lacks some of the affectations that have colored the speech of Boston and vicinity. For another thing, its isolation has preserved archaisms that have disappeared elsewhere.2 The Linguistic Atlas of New England reports on the speech of 46 informants scattered through 37 New Hampshire communities.
The first effort to compile a comprehensive word-list of the State was made in 1907 by Joseph William Carr,3 whose valuable studies of the speech of Arkansas and Maine have been mentioned under those States. Carr, who was an eager and highly intelligent investigator of American speechways, was a native of Hampstead, N. H., a village in the southeastern corner of the State, and spent the first twenty-four years of his life in contact with its speech. Hampstead was settled by immigrants from Massachusetts, and was once in Norfolk county, Mass., which comprised all the towns of the Bay Colony north of the Merrimac river. Its speech is thus almost identical with that of northeastern Massachusetts, but there are still some peculiarities worthy of note. I take a few specimens from Carr’s lengthy list, not recorded by Wentworth’s authorities: barge, an omnibus; Barrington beggars, pedlers and basket-makers from Barrington, N. H.; black snaps, huckleberries; checkermint, winter-green; cowy, use of contaminated milk; grassee, an artificial bank covered with grass; guts-ache, belly-ache; pricker, a brier; straddle-bug or stromp, a woman with a mannish gait, and tough cud, a hard character. Carr also unearthed some curious pronunciations, e.g., elk for yolk and geogaphry for geography. He had a second word-list under way when he died in 1908.1
Other contributors to the study of the New Hampshire vocabulary have been C. N. Greenough,2 George Allan England,3 Leo Wiener,4 and Jason Almus Russell.5 Greenough’s list was too short to be of any value. England’s second one included to stuboy, to set a dog on a person, tetnit, a child born of elderly parents, and the pronunciation skrivel for shrivel. Wiener’s was gathered in 1909 or thereabout from an informant who had lived at East Jaftrey, N. H., since 1858. He sent it to Dialect Notes but it was lost, and not until fifteen years later did he unearth his notes. He recorded browcing, a beating; calamity, old household goods; to stay up, to bandage, and the pronunciation crotch for crutch and shivel for shovel. England’s material came from Hillsborough county, on the Massachusetts border, as did that of Russell, published six years later. Russell’s additions were mainly survivals of “a dialect of former generations,” e.g., meeting-house, traced by the DAE to 1632; burying-ground, traced to 1759; contribution-box, to 1666; to snoop, 1832, and cellar-way, 1761.
Paul St. Gaudens, who was brought up in New Hampshire, tells me that the educated speech of the State has become assimilated to General American
, and, though “not as harsh as the Middle Western” variety, is “untainted by Bostonese.” But there is still, he says, “a surprisingly large number of folks back in the hills who somehow retain much of what must have been the manner of speech of the colonial settlers.”1 Some of the surviving terms he has noted are prug, pregnant; screwbore, a rifle; down-street, down-town; to get a feel, to feel the effects of alcohol; to think for, to think; to put right into it, to work hard, and strong, full measure. There used to be a speech-island on the Isles of Shoals, seven rocky islets off the New Hampshire coast, southeast of Portsmouth, but its dialect has been much modified by the talk of Summer visitors. The first to report upon it was Celia Thaxter (1836–94), daughter of the lighthouse keeper on White Island, who began to contribute articles on the island life to the Atlantic Monthly in 1867.2 She said:
The Shoals phraseology existing in past years was something not to be described; it is impossible by any process known to science to convey an idea of the intonations, quite different from Yankee drawl or sailor-talk.… Why they should have called a swallow a swallick and a sparrow a sparrick I never could understand, or what they mean by calling a great gale or tempest a tantoaster.… “I don’t know whe’r or no it’s best or no to go fishin’ whiles mornin’,” says some rough fellow.… Of his boat another says with pride: “She’s a pretty piece of wood?” … Two boys in bitter contention have been heard calling each other nasty-faced chowder-heads.… But it is impossible to give an idea of their common speech leaving out the profanity which makes it so startling.3
New Jersey
Francis B. Lee, of Trenton, began investigating the speech of New Jersey in 1892, and two years later he published the first of two reports upon it in Dialect Notes,4 but since then the philologs of the State have neglected the subject, though there must be rich material in the dialect of the so-called Pineys or Piners in the central and southern counties and in that of the Jackson Whites in the Ramapo mountains along the boundary-line between New Jersey and New York – in full sight, on a clear day, of the topless towers of Manhattan. The noblesse of the Newark region and the Oranges speak something resembling the pseudo-English of the Hudson valley, and the proletarians of Hudson county show the influence of Brooklynese, but in the main Jerseymen use General American. Even along the Atlantic coast there is a gap in the broad a territory between Cape May and Sandy Hook.
American Language Supplement 2 Page 23