American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  About a third of the counties of Virginia are wholly or partly west of the Blue Ridge; these counties differ physically, socially, and almost spiritually from the rest of the State.… Bean1 estimates that 63% of Mecklenburg county2 is of English stock, 57% of Augusta county3 of Scotch, and 71% of Shenandoah county4 of German descent. Several sections have been kept more or less separated from each other: the Eastern Shore counties are kept from the mainland by Chesapeake Bay; the long spine of the Blue Ridge and the various ridges west of the Alleghenies have tended to isolate many counties. Coastal influence is apparent in the speech of the Eastern Shore, which in some ways is more like the speech of coastal Maine or South Carolina than like that of the rest of Virginia. In the Shenandoah Valley Pennsylvania German phrases and whole communities of German speakers are to be found. In some parts of the Blue Ridge there are communities which, like those of the Tennessee, Kentucky and North Carolina highlanders, still keep some English idioms and pronunciations from the Eighteenth Century, such as dauncy, unwell; sallet, salad; and poke, sack.

  Tresidder sought to get a cross section of Virginia speech by having 254 of the girl students of Madison College, at Harrisonburg in the Shenandoah Valley, read a test passage of 195 words. Of these girls, all of them “from average middle-class families,” 74 were from Tidewater, 94 from the Piedmont, 76 from the Valley and Ridge province, and 10 from the Appalachian plateau. He concluded that “Virginia speech cannot be conveniently classified in geographical or ethnological divisions because in spite of physical and national differences the usages throughout the State, with some exceptions, are comparable.” His girls, of course, hardly provided “an entirely satisfactory basis for speculation about Virginia speech, since they were all from the same social level, all were women, and all were college students.” Perhaps these facts accounted in large part for the uniformities he noted: informants from the lower grades of society might have shown much greater differences. Even so he found a number of significant local usages, chiefly indicating that the maximum of elegance is in the Tidewater region, and that it declines steadily as one goes westward. Rather curiously, he found that the broad a was common only in aunt, rather and can’t.

  Primer’s pioneer study of 1890 was devoted to the speech of the Northern Neck, between the Rappahannock and the Potomac. Of the palatal glide in gyarden, gyirl, schyool and their like he said: “the pronunciation is not general. Some consider it vulgar and avoid it, but it can be heard in the best families.” He found both flat a and broad a in pass, ask, and half, and even in calm and psalm, but only broad a in haunt. He reported “the usual fluctuation” between ee-ther and eye-ther in Fredericksburg, and the absence of r from door, more, war and the like everywhere. Greet’s phonograph expedition of 1930 was to Williamsburg, between the York river and the James, not far from the Warwick region investigated by Green. He encountered difficulties, for the indigenes objected to having their speech recorded, even by a man whose middle name was Cabell, but in the end he accumulated 170 records, some of them of the speech of visitors from Richmond, Norfolk and Petersburg, all of which are in the same Sprachgebiet. On his return to his Columbia University dissecting-room to anatomize his specimens he found that the speech of the Williamsburg region was “rather rapid” and that “drawl and laziness” were not characteristic of it. The o in such words as log and long often became ah, that in go and know a diphthong made up of o and oo, the diphthong in out became a combination of the first vowel of further and something resembling the u of full, the a in car and far was prolonged in compensation for the loss of the r, and the i in I, mind, my, while and why tended to approximate ah.

  Davis and Hill, in their survey of Virginia folk-song crooners in 1933, found the same differences between the speech of the various Virginia regions before reported by others. They also recorded a “tendency to reduce the forms of the strong verbs to two instead of three,” and even to one, but this is common to all forms of vulgar American. In Tresidder’s paper on “The Speech of the Shenandoah Valley,” published in 1937, he reported that it was “influenced by the Pennsylvania Germans and by the mountain people as well as by importations from eastern Virginia.” He listed, as German loans, to schnitz, to peel, and the phrases “The salt is all,” “Give me goodbye,” “It’s wettin’ down out,” “Would you go to ride?,” “We’re fresh out of pork” and “You can have the cart either.” In a group of young women college students of the Valley he encountered such pronunciations as melk for milk, cáydet for cadet, hangry for hungry, dahmitory for dormitory, bum (with the u of full) for bomb, wush for wish, roodge for rouge, arn for iron, and tard for tired. Walsh, in 1940, reported that the so-called Cavalier accent was “becoming modified” in eastern Virginia, and “sometimes losing its most conspicuous feature, the broad a.”1

  Mrs. Nixon’s “Glossary of Virginia Words,” published in 1946 with a preface by Hans Kurath, is based upon 138 field records accumulated for the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. It is a list of about 275 terms, and all of them that have been reported in other parts of the country or in England are so marked. Unfortunately, the authorities consulted do not include Wentworth’s “American Dialect Dictionary,” published in 1944, and as a result a number of the terms appear as peculiar to Virginia though they are actually in use elsewhere, e.g., to change, to castrate, which Wentworth reports from West Virginia and which is also common in Maryland. Among those that seem to be exclusively Virginian are corn-stack, used on the Eastern Shore in place of corn-crib or corn-house; dry-land frog, a toad; green-beans, used west of the Blue Ridge for string-beans; home-made cheese, a Shenandoah term for cottage cheese or smearcase; johnny-house, a privy, “fairly common in the James valley and the southern part of the Blue Ridge”; milk-gap, used in the southern Blue Ridge for cow-pen; ox, a bull, “used on the lower Rappahannock in the presence of women”; and steer, also a bull, used “on the Eastern Shore, on the lower Rappahannock and in the southern Piedmont in the presence of women.” Wilson’s word-list of 1944 was gathered along the North Carolina border and also includes many North Carolina terms. Mrs. Nixon does not list you-all. Wilson says of it: “So much can be said about this much discussed pronoun that nothing is being said here. In spite of many clarifying articles on the subject there is still much misunderstanding.” But notwithstanding this despairing warning it will be tackled again in Chapter IX, Section 3.

  Lowman, in his paper of 1936, reported that he had found no less than seven different variations of the diphthong in house in Virginia speech. His discussion was too technical to be summarized here, but the substance of it was that the substitution of a diphthong made up of either the u of further or the a of sang and the u of full – “the most widespread and generally considered the Virginia type” – was “characteristic of the entire Piedmont north of the James,” of “a narrow strip south through Buckingham to Halifax county,” of “the Northern Neck peninsula between the Rappahannock and the Potomac,” of “the section between the upper Rappahannock and the upper James, of the Norfolk-Newport News area, and of the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay.” But with slight phonological differences he also found it in all other parts of the State – even among the Quakers of Loudoun county, the Scotch-Irish of the mountains, and the Germans of the Shenandoah Valley. Hench’s paper, read before the Modern Language Association in 1940, was accompanied by a list of terms gathered mainly in the vicinity of Charlottesville, in central Virginia. It included albatross, a kind of sail-boat; to backstand, to stand up for; cow-bug, a large beetle with hook-like horns; cunny fingered, butterfingered; dick-in-a-minute, immediately; dirty-camp, a brawl; dog-trot house, a house with an open passage between its two ends; fairway, a millrace; flat-toned, complete, absolute; house-moss, balls of dust; inch, a twelfth part of the daylight day (“I worked twelve inches today”: “I worked from dawn to dark”); to newspack, to spread gossip; rink, a pile of firewood, and sag, a gap in a mountain ridge.

  Woodward’s word-list of 1946 wa
s gathered at Salem, a town in the Shenandoah Valley, seven miles west of Roanoke. It consists mainly of terms in very wide American use, e.g., all the farther, backhouse, contrary (disobedient), gyp and hickey (a pimple), but also includes some not reported from other areas by Wentworth, e.g., bird snow, a late Spring snow; breath-harp, a harmonica; clatterwhacking, palaver; gospel-fowl, a chicken; ice-pebble, a hailstone; misty-moisty, threatening rain; nibby, inquisitive; river-jack, a stone from a stream, and in a swither, excited. He found Pennsylvania German influence in pon hosh (Ger. pfannhase). Blue hen’s chickens, usually applied to natives of Delaware, is used to designate the local gentry.

  Washington

  The speech of Washington differs little from that of Oregon. Some of its terms were listed by Benjamin H. Lehman in 1918.1 They show many loans from the argots of the Western cattlemen and lumbermen, but a few are of local origin, e.g., mothback, an apple grower; stopper, a lodger for the night; chix, a chicken (singular), and palouser, a greenhorn, a home-made lantern, or a sunset. The last is from Palouse, “the fertile, rolling region lying north of the Snake river in eastern Washington,” and Palouse in turn comes from the name of a tribe of Indians found by Lewis and Clark at the head of the Clearwater river.

  West Virginia

  In large part the speech of West Virginia is that of Appalachia, which has been dealt with a while back. But there are also signs of influence by the lowland speech of the South and even by Tidewater Southern, and traces of Pennsylvania infiltration are by no means lacking. In 1925 Carey Woofter, of West Virginia University, at Morgantown, enlisted his students in an effort to collect a vocabulary, and their gatherings were printed in American Speech two years later.1 They worked mainly in the eight counties lying in the valley of the Little Kanawha river, and so covered a region that was partly in the mountains and partly on lower ground. They got altogether more than 800 words and phrases, and the speech thus revealed turned out to be very interesting. Some of the locutions found that have not been reported elsewhere were: beaslings, the first milk of a fresh cow; boar’s nest, a camp of men without women; bull’s breakfast, a straw hat; to brouge, to idle; chestnut, thin soil on northern slopes; to be cold cocked, to be knocked out; consaity, hard to please; to crow-hop, to take an unfair advantage; to drive, to take a female animal to be bred; to pound hair, to drive a team; to help Andy, to do nothing; another hog off the corn, one less person to feed; to lap, to whip; sight of the eye, the pupil; sprag, a dead branch on a tree, and trink, a minnow used for bait. Some curious pronunciations were encountered, e.g., ahdn’t, hadn’t; keerpet, carpet, and severial, several. The Pennsylvania loans included snits, dried apples, and the widespread all, as in “The potatoes are all.” The euphemisms in use were mainly Appalachian, e.g., outsider, a bastard; to jape, to have sexual intercourse; male-hog, boar, and male-cow, bull. You all was found and also whistle-pig for ground-hog, the former common to the whole South and the latter characteristic of Appalachia. The dialect examined, though it was mainly rural, showed some influence from the argot of lumbermen, and also a good many smart words and phrases from the big cities, e.g., glad rags, to get one’s goat, and hard-boiled. A year after this excellent vocabulary was published Lowry Axley criticised it in American Speech on the ground that many of the terms listed were used also “in the mountains of the South, in other sections of the South and perhaps in other parts of the country,” but this self-evident fact hardly needed laboring.1

  In 1935 Hamill Kenny called attention to the prevalence of to in West Virginia folk-speech in places where Standard English uses other prepositions, as in “He spent a day to us,” “I have a fear to water,” “We stayed to home,” “I had a course to (i.e., under) Professor Blank,” etc. He said that this last use was frequent in the colleges of the State. Wentworth calls it peculiar to West Virginia and southeastern Ohio, but lists examples of the use of to in place of at, with, on, of, for and in from Maine to Florida. In 1936 Dean B. Lyman, of the University of West Virginia, sent American Speech some idioms from southeastern West Virginia, in the Appalachian speech-area, e.g., any more without a negative, as in “The store is closed any more”; at all used in the same way, as in “We had the best time at all”; the use of the long e in such words as condition, position, wish, making them condeetion, poseetion, weesh;2 the use of hope for wish, as in “I hope you good luck”; and the inversion represented by “I hope how soon I’ll see you,” meaning “I hope I’ll see you soon.”3 In 1939 John T. Krumpelmann followed with some locutions picked up at Huntington, on the Ohio river,4 the metropolis of the State, e.g., to beal, to suppurate; budget, a package, and want without the infinitive, as in “The dog wants out.” The former two are common in other parts of the country, and the last is Pennsylvania German. Krumpelmann likewise noted the change of the short i to a long one in condeetion, feesh, etc., and added the change of u to oo before sh, as in poosh (push) and cooshion (cushion).1 I am told by Mr. C. E. Smith, of the Fairmont Times, that feesh, deesh and poosh are heard also in Fairmont, which is in the north central part of the State, not far from the Pennsylvania line.2 In Nicholas county, in the center of the State, according to another correspondent,3 grist is so pronounced that it rhymes with Christ.

  The population of West Virginia is greatly mixed, with persons of Virginia origin probably predominating in the early strata, but with considerable elements of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Ohio stock mingled with them, and, in recent years, of immigrant Irish, Italians and Poles. In Taylor county, of which Grafton is the chief town, and in the adjoining Barbour county, there is an ancient settlement of mixed bloods known locally as the Guineas. Some of them claim to be of Dutch and Indian blood, but they show a Negro strain and a few of their surnames suggest German ancestry. There is an excellent study of them by William Harlen Gilbert, Jr.4

  Wisconsin

  On account of the eminence of the Milwaukee brewers Wisconsin is commonly thought of by Americans outside its bounds as a strongly German State, but as a matter of fact it was first settled by people from western New York, New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. The Germans, who began to filter in in 1839, did not come in large numbers until the middle 40s, and they were preceded by Norwegians and closely followed by Dutch, Czechs, Swedes and Poles. Dr. Frederic G. Cassidy, of the University of Wisconsin, who undertook a survey of the State for the Linguistic Atlas, is of the opinion that these immigrants have had but little influence upon the local speechways, save in isolated communities. He says:

  The foreign-derived population has apparently adopted the current American lexical pattern, with insignificant variations.… Their own words have not generally entered the local American vocabulary. They have had a sort of negative influence by adopting the most current terms, and (lacking an English-speaking home environment) by promoting the decay of many less current, older, or domestic words by remaining unaware of them.1

  Cassidy, whose doctorate comes from the University of Michigan, was trained in field work there under Marckwardt, and after experience in Michigan and Ohio gathered the Wisconsin material singlehanded. It comes from 25 communities, covering all parts of the State. It will not be published as a whole until the Great Lakes and Ohio valley section of the Linguistic Atlas is completed. In 1923 Howard J. Savage printed a brief word-list of Wisconsin speech,2 but it showed only a small number of terms not in common use elsewhere, e.g., elm-peeler, a poor white; fuskit, an old army musket; hi-open-bopens, Fourth of July merrymakers; mule-foot, a hog with undivided hoofs; penadie, bread crumbs with butter, sugar and hot water; smooth-bore, a worthless fellow; splint-shin, a strain of the leg muscles, and yelper, a young turkey. Savage also listed some local metaphors, e.g., to take his commission, to castrate, and to tip over, to die. In 1940 Cassidy printed a few locutions in American Speech,3 but they were mainly terms familiar, in some form or other, elsewhere.4 In 1947 an immigrant from New Jersey contributed to the Milwaukee Journal the following observations on Wisconsin speech:

  Can it be tha
t Wisconsin has a language all its own? Some of the people I have in mind are high-school graduates. Others have had further education, so apparently it isn’t lack of training. A few examples:

  That’s for sure in lieu of definitely, absolutely or positively. Panes of glass are window-lights. The word ever appears constantly, as in “Is it ever cold” or “Was I ever glad,” even in the newspapers and on the radio. Bedroom or house slippers are morning slippers. A gal’s slip becomes an underskirt. Stockings are socks, regardless of the length. Pursued or chased is took after. A photographer’s studio is a picture gallery. “I’ll borrow you $5” is used instead of loan or lend. “Did you find back your pocketbook?” – why the back? I haven’t heard anyone say hello or how are you? The accepted salutation is hi. At the movies, instead of requesting tickets for adults and children, they say large and small.1

  One native, commenting upon this Jerseyman’s strictures in the Journal, declared that the peculiarities noted were confined to Milwaukee, where “even teachers and radio announcers are not free from local errors.”2 Another, pace Cassidy, blamed the influence of various foreign groups. “We are,” he said, “a melting pot and speak a mixed language with disregard for correct English.”3

  Wyoming

  The first to report on the speech of what is now Wyoming4 was P. W. Norris, superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park.5 In 1884, in a book called “The Calumet of the Coteau,”6 he included “A Glossary of Indian Names, Words and Western Provincialisms,”7 and thought it necessary to define, for the benefit of Easterners, a number of terms that are now familiar to every American schoolboy, e.g., badlands, butte, cañon, geyser, mustang and pemmican.8 He also included some Indian words, from the Chinook and other dialects, that have since dropped out of use or become localisms, e.g., illahi, my country; ka, no; kamook, a dog; kokosh, pork; manonim, wild rice; odeona, a village; siwash, a male Indian; skookum, brave, and tillacume, enemies. In 1911 Helen Bruner and Frances Francis contributed to Dialect Notes “A Short Word List From Wyoming”1 made up chiefly of cattlemen’s terms, e.g., biscuit-shooter, a camp cook;2 dogie, a motherless calf; cavvies, stray cattle, and pail-feed, a calf raised on skim milk. There is a much longer vocabulary of the cattlemen in the Wyoming volume of the American Guide Series.3