American Language Supplement 2 (32 page)

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

The fact that Dr. Louise Pound was born in Nebraska and has spent nearly all her life there
⁴
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 1911
¹
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 of 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:

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
soddies
¹
 … 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 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

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 speech
ways, 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: