American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  They oughta get somebody else to brung it.

  He oughtn to done it.

  I like to froze on that job.

  I told him he ought not to et it.

  I’d a went with him if he’d a-come by.

  I done done it.

  The earliest report on the speech of Texas that I have been able to unearth was contributed to Dialect Notes in 1915 by Hyder E. Rollins, a native of Abilene, in the west central part, who had been instructor in English at the University of Texas in 1912–14.1 His list was confined to such words and phrases as he had himself heard in use; it showed a great deal less Appalachian influence than the eastern dialect studied by Stanley. The argot of the cattlemen supplied a number of terms, e.g., maverick, an unbranded calf; locoed, crazy; son-of-a-bitch, a meat and vegetable stew;2 chuck, food; and surface-coal, cow dung. Rollins noted a curious pronunciation of against, as in “He fell again the door.” He found that back East referred to any part of Texas east of the speaker, or any of the Southern States, but never to what is generally called the East. The Appalachian poke, a bag, was in use, and also to grunt, to complain, but the Appalachian antigodlin, out of plumb, askew, was transformed into anti-goslin. Some apparently indigenous forms were Christmas, whiskey; Dutchman, a contemptuous name applied to any foreigner or even to a disliked native; spasm, a stanza of a song, and tank, an artificial lake. Rollins listed to goose as meaning to tickle, with no reference to the special American meaning. He said that every lawyer in the area he surveyed was a brevet judge (pro. jedge), that syrup or molasses was lick, and that molasses, mumps and measles were always treated as plural nouns.

  Other Texas word-lists were published during the years following by C. L. Crow,1 Artemisia Baer Bryson,2 Wilmer R. Park,3 Charles H. Hogan,4 and Carmelita Klipple,5 and in 1944 John T. Krumpelmann contributed to American Speech a small group of early Texanisms unearthed from a German travel-book of 1848.6 Crow’s list was confined to terms picked up in Parker county, just west of Forth Worth, in 1896. It included beyonst for beyond; hayseeder for hayseed;7 library, a bookcase; to office with, to share an office with, and ransation, spiritual libido at a revival. He added a few from other Texas counties, e.g., thunder-hole, a storm-cellar; to perdure, to remain true to the faith, e.g., Methodism; and to cattle-mill, to go round in a circle. Miss Bryson added larrapin, an adjective signifying superior;8 inland, used of a town without a railroad, and hissy, a fit of anger, and also a few curious pronunciations, e.g., whelp for welt, poarched egg for poached, and pararie for prairie. Park, writing from Lampasas, in the center of the State, not far from Austin and Waco, reported that he found “an appalling use of double auxiliaries, even among educated people,” and cited I might can, I might could, I used to could, it might would, he ought to could and she may can. Hogan, a Northerner, noted how that, as in “It came to me how that we might get a new roof on the church”; a-woofin, lying or jessing; flat-out, bluntly, as in “I flat-out told him”; come in this house, an exclamation of greeting, and bud, a brother. Miss Klipple operated in a region a little to the south of that investigated by Park. She found a good many traces of Appalachian influence, with the flat a in aunt, hit for it in emphasized situations, and the loss of d in unstressed and intervocalic positions. “Although Spicewood people,” she said, “say krais for Christ, when they come to form the possessive they know that kraisiz is wrong, so they say kraistiz.… When they use taken in the preterite they often go on to pattern it after weak verbs and say takened.… For Mrs. neither General American misiz nor formal Southern miziz is heard: it is pronounced miz or more frequently mizriz.… In the sentence, ‘I hear Martin,’ both r’s are strongly articulated.”1

  Spanish is widely spoken along the Rio Grande, and is taught in the elementary schools there, beginning with the third grade and running to the eighth, but its use is by no means as prevalent as in New Mexico, nor has it left so heavy a deposit of loans.2

  Utah

  The speech of Utah is General American, but it has been influenced in vocabulary by the argot of the Mormons, and by those of miners and cattlemen. Miss Dorothy N. Lindsay3 says that the Mormon terminology “has wide currency” in an area comprising all of the State, southern Idaho, northern Arizona, western Wyoming, and parts of Texas, New Mexico and California. Most of its words and phrases are ecclesiastical. A boy of twelve, aspiring to social security post-mortem, may sign for the Aaronic priesthood as a deacon, and thereafter win promotion to the ranks of teacher and priest. After that follows the Melchisedek priesthood, with the ranks of elder, seventy and high priest. Still higher are those of bishop, patriarch and apostle. The church is organized into wards, and several wards form a stake, whose head is a bishop or stake president. A non-Mormon is a gentile or outsider, and a Mormon who is expelled from the communion is said to be cut off. When a high church dignitary is seized with an idea and desires to propagate it he announces that he has had a revelation. Says Miss Lindsay:

  A person may be sealed to another to whom he is not married, and may be married without being sealed. The two ceremonies are distinct, though they may occur simultaneously if both parties are Mormons, and they must occur if they go through the Temple for the marriage. Frequently a couple will defer the sealing for several years after marriage, possibly on the theory that since it endures for eternity it is not to be entered upon as lightly as a mere life contract. If husband and wife die without having been sealed their children often have the rite performed for them, so that the marriage may be perpetuated in the spirit world. Children may also be sealed to their parents, and … the living may be sealed to the dead.

  Brother and Sister are used in place of Mr. and Mrs., adds Miss Lindsay, “not occasionally or among the very pious, but constantly and among people of all types and ages.… The word Mr. does not enter the vocabulary of a child until he learns that there is a distinction between saint and outsider.”

  Vermont

  Culturally and historically, Vermont has always been closer to New York than to eastern New England, and that fact is reflected in its speech.1 The r in such words as barn and four is clearly sounded2 in the western part of the State; the flat a is common, even in aunt,3 and the vocabulary, save for some archaisms, seems to be mainly identical with that of General American. Rather curiously, the Vermont dialect has been very little studied. Indeed, the only report on it that I have encountered is but a fragment, and deals exclusively with the speech of the southernmost part of the State, bordering on western Massachusetts.4 It shows no terms not to be found in other places. Even Calvin Coolidge’s use of to choose in his famous “I do not choose to run”5 has been reported from places as far distant as Alabama.6

  Virginia

  Some of the peculiarities of Virginia speech were noted before the Revolution – for example, by Philip Vickers Fithian, a young Princeton graduate who served as tutor to the children of Robert Carter on the great estate of Nomini Hall near Richmond in 1773 and 1774.1 Others were recorded by Noah Webster in his “Dissertations on the English Language,” published in Boston in 1789,2 by John Pickering in his “Vocabulary” of 1816, by Robley Dunglison in the Virginia Literary Museum in 1829, by Mrs. Anne Royall in her “Letters From Alabama” in 1830,3 and by uncounted lesser observers during the years before the Civil War.4 In later times there has been a great deal of writing on the subject, beginning with a paper by Sylvester Primer, “The Pronunciation of Fredericksburg,” published in 1890,5 and including two whole books, B. W. Green’s “Word-Book of Virginia Folk-Speech”6 and Edwin Francis Shewmake’s “English Pronunciation in Virginia,”7 and a pamphlet, Phyllis J. Nixon’s “Glossary of Virginia Words.”1 Virginia speech is also dealt with in Elizabeth Jeannette Dearden’s “Word Geography of the South Atlantic States,” already noticed under Maryland and North Carolina, and there are studies of it in the philological literature by W. Cabell Greet,2 Argus Tresidder,3 G. G. Laubscher,4 Guy S. Lowman, Jr.,5 George P. Wilson,6 A. P. Man, Jr.,7 Chad Walsh,8 Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr.,9 J. Wilson McCut
chan,10 L. R. Dingus,11 Richard H. Thornton,12 C. Alphonso Smith,13 Atcheson L. Hench,14 and C. M. Woodward.15

  Three main speech areas are commonly distinguished in Virginia – that of the Tidewater dialect, which runs up to the fall-line on the rivers; that of General Lowland Southern, which covers the Piedmont, and that of Appalachia. There are a number of small speech pockets, but they are not important. One is to be found in Gloucester county, in a small peninsula called Guinea Neck, between the York and Severn rivers at their mouths. This remote region is said to have been settled by Hessian prisoners disbanded at Yorktown, but no trace of German influence remains in its speech, which resembles, according to Greet,1 that of Charleston, S. C. The inhabitants are fishermen, and there are no Negroes. One of the local peculiarities is the exaggerated use of singular nouns in the plural, as in two doctor. Another is the pronunciation of here as hee, with no trace of the r remaining and no substitution of ah. Another area of aberrant speech is the Shenandoah Valley, where terms and pronunciations borrowed from Pennsylvania, from Appalachia and from the Piedmont have been mingled with Tidewater. The speech of the Piedmont, according to Miss Deardon, “is more closely related to Tidewater than to mountain speech,” mainly because the area was settled from the coast, and not by the movement of population down the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge. The chief dialect boundary in the State, she says, “runs north and south parallel to the Blue Ridge.” It enters the State between Frederick and Loudon counties, the first of which borders on West Virginia and the second on Maryland, and crosses the North Carolina line in the vicinity of Danville. It runs well to the east of the mountains in the southern part of the State.

  Green’s “Word-Book of Virginia Folk-Speech,” a volume of 530 pages,2 lists about 7200 terms and is thus the largest State glossary ever published. Green, who hailed from Warwick county on the James, not far from its mouth, in what is called the Lower Peninsula, dealt mainly with Tidewater speech, and found it heavy with archaisms. “It seems to resemble,” he said, “the standard English of the time that the first immigrants came to the country, and there has been no foreign mixture, as the comers were English and few or none have come from other parts of the United States.” Unhappily, his enormous word-list is by no means confined to Virginia localisms; on the contrary, it is burdened with many words and usages that are common to the vulgar speech of the whole country. In a number of cases, however, he records locutions that have not been noted elsewhere, e.g., akerel, a man’s given-name; aquecope, an enlarged spleen following malaria; berlue, a noise or racket (from hullabaloo?); by-blow, a bastard; drabbletail, a slattern; goer-by, a passer-by; hang-by, a hanger-on; minister’s face, the upper part of a hog’s head, less the ears, nose and jowl; smicket, a small amount, and to yuck, to yank or jerk.

  Man’s word-list of 1914 was gathered between 1901 and 1907 in Louisa county, in the Piedmont region of the center of the State, northwest of Richmond. He noted that air and hour were both pronounced aiah, that few was used in the sense of any small amount, as in “a few mashed potatoes,” that on was used before designations of time, as in on yesterday and on last week,1 that hobgoblins were called bineys or evils, and that the local underprivileged were given to a number of curious outrages upon the normal conjugation of verbs, e.g., “I’m is the one.” Dingus’s list of 1915 came from the Clinch Valley in Scott county, in the far southwestern corner of the State, and thus showed mainly Appalachian terms, e.g., fire-board, a mantlepiece; Good Man, God; holler-horn, a disease among cattle, supposed to be cured by boring holes in their horns; to lumber, to make a loud noise; new ground, virgin land; to norate, to gossip; piece, a short distance; rise of, slightly more than, and skift, a light fall of snow. Dingus noted the usual Appalachian euphemisms, e.g., male for bull and male-hog for boar, and added one that seemed to be indigenous – boar-cat for Tom-cat. He added some notes on the phonology and syntax of the local speech. The a in closed syllables, he said, was invariably that of man, and at the end of a syllable it became the neutral vowel. The unaccented o at the end of words became er, with “the r always heard, even if it is indistinct.” “Present participles used attributively are compared as other adjectives, e.g., runnin’er horse, singingest girl, grown upest, worn outest.” Laubscher, in 1916, recorded either in the sense of instead at Lynchburg, as in “You can do that either,” apparently a sign of Pennsylvania influence by way of the Shenandoah Valley. Thornton, commenting upon Dingus’s word-list, found in it “survivals of pure Elizabethan English preserved among the mountains of southwestern Virginia for three centuries,” and cited agin as a conjunction, hope as a variant of the old preterite holp, and dremp for dreamed.

  Shewmake’s “English Pronunciation in Virginia,” unlike Green’s “Word-Book of Virginia Folk-Speech,” is confined to the speech of the State, and though it deals almost wholly with what is here called Tidewater, it attempts to differentiate between different speech levels, running from that of the educated gentry at the top to that of the most ignorant country Negroes at the bottom. “The city of Richmond,” he says,

  is regarded as the speech center of the territory in which the Virginia dialect prevails, though dwellers in other cities of eastern Virginia, as well as many rural folk of the same region, may speak this dialect in an equally representative way.… It would be inaccurate to say that the Virginia dialect is traceable in any marked way to Negro influence, for the details that make it up are, in the main, either different from typical Negro English or else are clearly derived from other sources.… Virginians are distinguished from other Americans less easily by their vocabulary than by their pronunciation. A speaker may talk for an hour without using many words or constructions that are not standard, but his peculiarities of pronunciation will reveal themselves in almost every sentence that he utters.1

  Shewmake lists the more significant of these peculiarities as follows:

  1. The insertion of the “glide or vanishing y-sound between g and a in words like garden and garment, between c or k and a in such words as card and carpet, and after c or k in words of the type of sky and kind.… It is heard chiefly in the speech of men and women of the older generation belonging to some of the old, highly cultured families.”2

  2. “The great majority of Virginians pronounce … words like path and dance … with the sound that a has in man, but the pronunciation with the so-called broad or Italian or Cavalier a and also that which includes what is known as intermediate a3 are both heard at times.”

  3. “The so-called standard pronunciation of diphthongal ou is approximately that of a in father plus that of oo in pool or possibly that of oo in foot, but the pronunciation heard in Eastern Virginia is approximately that of u in hut plus the same sound used in standard pronunciation for the second part of the diphthong.… Typical eastern Virginia speech includes those who pronounce about, house and out with dialectal ou, and crowd, how and loud with standard ou.” Uh-oo is used “when the diphthong is immediately followed in the same syllable by the sound of a voiceless consonant, but under all other conditions standard ah-oo is employed.”

  4. “The standard sound of the diphthong … in such words as bright, like and price … is that of a in father plus that of i in pin; the dialectal sound is approximately that of u in hut plus that of i in pin.” This dialectal sound occurs when the diphthong is followed immediately by a voiceless consonant, e.g., advice, bite and life, and when it is followed in the next syllable by a voiceless consonant and an obscure vowel, e.g., cipher, hyphen, rifle and viper. In other cases the standard diphthong is heard, e.g., in alibi, dialect, bridle, typhoid, advise.

  5. “The substitution of n for ng in unaccented syllables pervades almost all levels of speech in Virginia.”

  6. Following the a of father, the e of her, the o of or and the u of fur, r “is not sounded at all.”1 Initial or medial r preceded by any other vowel becomes a sort of neutral vowel. In other situations it has its full sound.

  7. The following words have the sound of oo in
pool: aloof, boot, groom, proof, rooster, root, soon, spook and spoon. The following have the sound of u in pull: butcher, coop, Cooper, hoop, Hooper, nook and rook. “The rest vary with different speakers: broom, hoof, room.”

  8. “Virginians share the general lack of uniformity in pronouncing God, log and fog. Though the aw- or au-sound, or an approach to it, is often noticed, many, if not most Virginians use the short o-sound, as in hot.”2

  Some of Shewmake’s conclusions were challenged by Hans Kurath in American Speech, August, 1928, and by Argus Tresidder in the same journal, April, 1941, and Shewmake answered them in its columns in February, 1943. Tresidder resumed the discussion in December, 1943. He divided Virginia into four speech areas instead of the usual three – Tidewater, including the Eastern Shore; the Piedmont “extending from the fall-line to the slopes of the Blue Ridge, spreading out like an inverted funnel, two counties wide in the north and seven counties wide in the south, and embracing the largest part of the State”; the Valley and Ridge province, “made up of a very irregular series of linear ridges and valleys, including the Shenandoah,” and the Appalachian plateau, “at the very south-western corner of the State.”3 He continued: