American Language Supplement 2 (28 page)
Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
is a peculiarly favorable field. We have here side by side representatives of nearly every State in the Union and from a dozen foreign countries.… The remark that there is no such thing as a Kansas dialect rests upon a misapprehension of what is meant by the term. In just the same way that we speak of the flora and fauna of Kansas we may speak of the dialect of Kansas.… Standard literary English is always a little behind the times. It is the stuffed and mounted specimen in the museum. Dialect is the living animal on its native heath.
Kansas has had another diligent student of its speech in Judge J. C. Ruppenthal, a native of Philadelphia who was taken to the State in childhood, and rose to be a district judge at Russell, a member of the State Judicial Council, and professor of law in the University of Kansas. His principal contributions to the subject were word-lists published in
Dialect Notes
between 1914 and 1923.
1
He said in the preface to his first list:
There are a large number of expressions that have come from the Germans, including the Pennsylvania Germans, and the Germanic elements or German-speaking peoples of central Kansas, who are natives not only of Germany, but of Russia, Austria, Switzerland, Luxemburg, etc. Although there is a large Slav element, and perhaps a larger Scandinavian element, neither of these appears to have contributed a single word or phrase to the language of central Kansas. In addition there are some English, Irish, Scotch, Welsh, French, Belgians, Greeks, and, recently, Mexicans. Negroes are few and much scattered. Excepting Mexicans and Negroes, all other elements seem to be rapidly absorbed into the general population.
The terms listed by Judge Ruppenthal came mainly from the central part of the State and many of them were picked up in his courtroom at Russell. They included a number not since unearthed by any of Wentworth’s authorities in other States,
e.g., beany
, mentally defective;
black dishes
, cooking utensils;
to bushwhack
, to borrow with intent to return;
one at a clatter
, one at a time;
dead in the shell
, worn out;
to do bandies
, to do stunts on a dare;
fast
, untrustworthy;
to gig back
, to back down;
to go south
, to be beaten;
go-back land
, cultivated land that has reverted to prairie;
goop
, a person of uncouth manners;
goose heaven
, the bourne of dead animal pets;
to hog
, to sow grain in unplowed land;
kolfactor
, a term of contempt;
kump
, a deep dish, such as a soup-plate;
pass-word
, a greeting;
to penny-dog
, to fawn on;
like siz
, copiously, expressively;
spread-water
, the overflow of a stream;
dumb Isaac
, a simpleton;
elk-face
, in which the cheek furrows run nearly parallel with the nose;
to give one the flit-flaps
, to make one nervous;
to tit
, to milk a cow; and
weehaw
, askew, awry. He found some curious pronunciations,
e.g., alfathy
for
alfalfa, swullen
for
swollen, elder
for
udder, flavior
for
flavor, twell
or
twill
for
till, hearso
for
hearsay, side-draft
for
sight-draft, staked
for
stalled, fochts
, with a German
ch
-sound, for
folks;
and
barrow, narrow
, etc., with a broad
a
. He encountered many German loans,
e.g., blutwurst
, blood sausage;
schwartenmagen
, souse or hog’s head cheese;
to slurp
, to eat noisily (Ger.
schlürfen
);
heia
, an exclamation (Ger.
Herr Je
or
Herr Jesu
, Lord Jesus);
wassermucker
, a Prohibitionist (Ger.
wasser
, water, and
mucker
, a bigot);
schleckerig
, fastidious;
to take goodby; uhrgucker
, a clock-watcher;
mix-max
, a medley or confusion (Ger.
misch-masch
);
mush
, rotten (Ger.
morsch
);
Sauerteig
, leaven;
half-brother
, the son of a father’s brother (Ger.
halb-bruder
);
1
and several loans from the Yiddish, taken in through the German,
e.g., mazuma
, money, and
tookis
, the anus (Yid.
tochos
, the backside).
2
He also found some French and Spanish loans,
e.g., bayou
and
cabase
, the head (Sp.
cabeza
). In a paper upon the speech of the region of which Kansas City is the metropolis, contributed to
Dialect Notes
in 1926, Miss Josephine M. Burnham, of the University of
Kansas, listed a few other peculiarities,
1
e.g.
, the frequent use of
to get
, as in “He didn’t
get to go
,” and of
to do
, as in “
Do you have
some ink?”. “The Kansans,” said Miss Burnham, would never say, “We
have no
bananas,” but always, “We
don’t have any
bananas.” The
a
, she added, was often omitted in
after a while
, and
the
the before
United States
, and
the
was inserted before
most
, as in “
The most
of the time.”
In the great days of Bleeding Kansas the inmates of the State prided themselves upon the alleged fact that what they called the
Kansas language
was simpler, franker and more vivid than that of the decadent East. As one of their editors, Nelson Antrim Crawford, has recorded,
2
there was “no goddam grammar” in it. Its great professors were the politicians and world-savers who then howled from every stump, but it was also used by the State literati. Crawford reports that it is now vanishing. “Kansas,” he says, “has become a conservative State, and most of its people consciously seek to become like the people of other conservative States. Something resembling the old-time Kansas language … is more likely to be heard today in Iowa or North Dakota than in Kansas.”
What is now Kentucky was the first region beyond the mountains to be settled. Pioneers began to invade it before the Revolution, and by 1782 it had more than 30,000 population.
3
It was originally a part of Virginia, and the effort to organize it as an independent State took a great deal of politicking, but it was finally admitted to the Union on June 1, 1792, little more than a year after Vermont, the first new State to come in. During the period down to the War of 1812 many of the neologisms then called Westernisms were coined within its bounds, and some of its early heroes, notably Daniel Boone, made contributions to the store.
4
The present speech of the
State, like that of Tennessee, ranges from Appalachian to General American, with the latter showing strong Southern influences. The first serious study of it was made by John P. Fruit, of Bethel College at Russelville, in the southwestern lowlands, in 1890.
1
Most of the terms he listed belonged to the common stock of vulgar American, especially in the West,
e.g., to crawfish; to saw gourds
, to snore:
gallus
, suspenders, and
ruckus
, a disturbance, but he also found some that have not been reported from other regions,
e.g., beastback
, horseback;
drats
, a game of marbles;
in a bad row of stumps
, in a tight place, and
whittlety-whit
, fifty-fifty. In 1910 Miss Abigail E. Weeks published in
Dialect Notes
a brief word-list from Barbourville in the southeastern corner of the State, but it consisted mainly of Appalachian terms.
2
A year later Hubert G. Shearin, of Transylvania University at Lexington, in the Bluegrass country, followed with a longer one from that region.
3
It offered some oddities in vocabulary,
e.g., red-nose
, discouragement;
dough-beater
, a housewife; and
slowcome
, a lazy fellow, but they were not numerous.
There was then a long wait until 1946, when Miss Virginia Park Matthias and Fred A. Dudley offered brief contributions to the subject. Both confined their inquiries to the Appalachian area. Miss Matthias
4
presented some interesting specimens of the local dialect, but most of them were common to the whole Appalachian range and not a few were old in the British dialects:
blinky
, soured (used of milk),
agin
(against) as a preposition, as in “He’ll be home
agin
November,” and
favor
, to resemble. Among her less familiar terms were
latch-pin
, a safety-pin;
natural-looking
, familiar, and
waste
, a hemorrhage. Dudley
5
added
caps
, popcorn;
carton-box
, carton;
6
hoved out
, bulged or warped (used of woodwork) and
smother-some
, hot and humid.
7
“In the State of Louisiana, which was colonized by the French,” said John Russell Bartlett, in the preface to the second edition of his “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States,”
1
“there are many words of foreign origin, scarcely known in the Northern States. The geographical divisions, the names of rivers, mountains, bays; the peculiarities of soil and climate; all that relates to the cultivation of the earth, the names of fishes, birds, fruits, vegetables, coins, etc., retain to a great extent the names given them by the first possessors of the country.” So far as I know, no effort was made to study this speech until 1890, when J. W. Pearce, of Tulane University at New Orleans, printed a brief word-list in
Dialect Notes
.
2
Pearce, however, paid no heed to the French sediment in it, but gave his attention mainly to pronunciations in the purely English vocabulary,
e.g., axed
for
asked, riz
for
rise, jine
for
join, bender
for
hinder, maracle
or
meracle
for
miracle
, and
dreen
for
drain
, nearly all of them common to the vulgar speech of the whole country. He was followed twenty-six years later by a colleague at Tulane, E. Riedel, who had a sharper ear for French influence
3
and listed a number of characteristic loans,
e.g., armoir
, a wardrobe;
brioche
, a kind of cake,
gris gris
, a magical formula to gain advantage in a game;
jambalaya
, a hash containing ham and rice;
picayune
, five cents, and
praline
, a candy made of brown sugar and nuts, but he somehow contrived to omit
lagniappe
.
4
A little later James Routh, associate professor of English at Tulane and secretary of the American Dialect Society for the Gulf States, began supplying
Dialect Notes
with longer and better lists.
5
His first paper added
brulée
, an open place in a swamp;
flottant
, a soft prairie;
minnie
, a cat (Fr.
minet
); and
kruxingiol
, a cake eaten at Mardi Gras (Fr.
croquignole
); his second,
marronguin
, a large mosquito;
nanan
, a godmother;
pieu
, a fence built of boards;
rabais-shop
, 2l notion store;
briqué
, a red-haired mulatto; and
to coshtey
, to steal (Fr.
cocheter
); and his third,
bidon
, a man’s hat;
boucan
, a smudge fire to keep off mosquitoes;
papiettes
, curl-papers; and
parin
, a godfather. He added some English forms apparently of local origin,
e.g., little small
, a small amount;
basin
, a channel;
down the street
, downtown;
onfinancial
, without money;
nick
, a pile of wood; to
skull-drag
and to
maul-drag
, to do servant’s work, and
tin-a-fix
, a tinsmith, and recorded the diphthongization of
er
in
boid
(
bird
) and
desoive
(
deserve
), as in the Brooklyn, N. Y., dialect.
1
To his second list he added a large number of local bird-names, chiefly gathered from notes printed in the New Orleans
Picayune
, March-July, 1916, by Stanley Clisby Archer,
e.g., aigle noir
, the golden eagle;
becasse
, the woodcock;
biorque
, the bittern;
cou collier
, the kildee;
egret caille
, the blue crane;
goelan
, the gull;
moineau
, the English sparrow;
perdreaux
, the quail; and
zel rond
, the darter.
Pearce, in his pioneer study, had noted what appeared to him to be a German loan, to wit,
whatfer
, as in “
Whatfer
man is he?,” from the German
was für
. He said that it was in common use in Red River parish. This is some distance above the so-called German Coast of Louisiana, which runs along both banks of the Mississippi for about forty miles, beginning twenty-five miles north of New Orleans, and was settled during the Eighteenth Century, but there was early penetration of the Red River valley by the German setlers.
2
In the same sense of
what sort of
the term is recorded by Wentworth in Lebanon county, Pennsylvania, and in West Virginia, western Maryland, central New York, and Iowa—all of them regions showing German influence. Two other possible German loans in the northern part of Louisiana were recorded in 1935, to wit,
to cook coffee
and the use of
until
in place of
that
, as in “I was so hot
until
I nearly melted.” The former is a common Pennsylvania Germanism, and the latter has analogues in Pennsylvania.
1
In this northern part of the State Gallicisms are relatively rare, and the speech in general is that of the Ozarks.
2
In the south, however, large numbers of French loans are in everyday use,
e.g., banquette
, a sidewalk;
gabrielle
, a loose wrapper;
îlet
, a city square;
jalousie
, a Venetian blind; and
to make ménage
, to clean house.
3
