Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Joan Houston Hall, former president of the American Dialect Society, former president of the Dictionary Society of North America and longtime editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, better known as DARE, and that's what we're going to talk about today.
Joan, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Well, thank you very much.
You bet.
I am so excited to have you here because DARE is just one of the funnest.
You know my listeners might not like me saying funnest, but I think it's one of the funnest dictionary projects out there, one of the funnest language projects.
Can you tell people sort of what kinds of words go into DARE?
Well, we consider a word to be regional if it is someplace in the US, whether that's a tiny portion of a state, even part of a city, a region of several states, most of the country, but not everywhere.
We also consider things to be regional if they are what we call folk.
That is things that you wouldn't find in standard dictionaries but people use just in their everyday lives.
So a lot of those are the particularly fun words.
And I agree, it's the funnest dictionary around.
And does it include slang?
We try not to include slang because by definition, slang is very ephemeral.
If your teenage kids use it and then all of a sudden their 10-year-old sibling uses it, they stop because it's an in-group kind of thing and it lets you know what group you're part of.
But when others start budging in on it, then no longer is it functioning as it should.
So these words are regional, but durable as well then.
Yes.
Durable is a little bit hard to define in this case, because sometimes we have a single quotation for an entry.
And in that case, with only one quotation, we call it a once-er.
And to indicate that in the text, we put a vertical bar with two horizontal bars on it.
And what that means is that we think that this is probably widely used in the community.
But at the same time, we know that people have family words.
Sometimes they make up words and sometimes they simply misspeak.
So we put that warning sign by our Oncers.
And I'm really pleased to say that very often, even though we've put a Oncer sign on it later we find corroborating evidence.
And that helps justify our Sprachgefühl, that is, our language feeling, that we thought that this probably was a legitimate entry.
Oh, that's wonderful.
You know, and it goes the other way around too, because you know we do familects at the end of the Tuesday show for the podcast of family dialect stories.
And I've had more than one person call in and say that they have a word that is their familect.
They think they're the only one uses or the only family that uses it.
And when I look into it, I find out it's regional.
So I think Red Up is an example that I think is in Dare.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
And someone thought that was their family life.
They thought only their family used it, because I think they lived in a region where it wasn't common.
Oh, little family travel, maybe, or historical with ancestors from Scotland, perhaps.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I want to get right to the words because there are so many wonderful words.
And I'm laughing because there are not many things as a writer that are physically demanding.
But moving around this book is actually, I'm afraid it's going to kill me.
It's so heavy.
So I have a volume two of the Dictionary of American Regional English.
It is six volumes.
It's a very thick book.
People on YouTube can see.
And it has these wonderful maps.
And so I'm going to try to hold this up.
This is the map for egg turner.
Egg turner is a regional word in here.
And I also have, I have my own little family story because...
I discovered I brought show and tell as well.
My family calls both of these things a spatula.
One of them is something you use to flip pancakes or eggs.
And the other one is a thing you use to scrape the side of a mixing bowl.
And my husband and I were in the kitchen one day and I said, hand me the spatula.
And he said, which one?
And we realized we don't have separate words for these two things, but the rest of the world clearly does.
I don't.
No, you do?
Right.
I call them both spatulas.
Yeah, but there were so many.
So in here, so we have egg turner, which is just so descriptive.
What else?
There were some other ones.
So we had egg turner, flipper.
Flipper, that's fun.
I may have heard someone call it a flipper.
Lifter and cake turner.
Because, of course, there are words that you can distinguish between the two gadgets.
Yeah.
I don't think of other synonyms, though, for the bowl scraper.
Yeah, the only one I looked it up and the only one I found, well, there's rubber scraper.
And then there are other words in foreign languages.
So in Dutch, it is apparently pannenlikker.
So there are a number of words that play on the word licker.
Not surprisingly to me, not the idea that you lick the spatula, but because the spatula licks the bowl clean.
Oh, very nice.
The concept.
You know, I held it up.
The people on YouTube will be able to see.
But the maps are really interesting in DARE.
They're recognizable as the map of the United States.
But as I'm looking at it, I'm thinking, well, it's also a little off.
And then, like, what happened to Florida?
Yes, it is a very strange looking map.
And the reason is that it's based on population density of the country as of the 1960 census.
And that was a long time ago.
But as you say, the shapes are recognizable.
But if you look, for instance, at Connecticut, which is up in the Northeast and which we know is a pretty small state, we also know that Connecticut is very densely populated.
So what we had to do was make Connecticut bigger in order to account for the large number of people.
But New Mexico, for instance, is a very large state in terms of square miles, but it's sparsely populated.
So that on our map had to be shrunk to a little sliver.
So it shows where most of the people live in this country or did back then.
And what that means is that if you have blank spots on the map, it's because people don't use the particular word.
It's not because they're underneath people there.
So the dots on the map, they show where that particular word is used in the country.
Yes.
I mean, New York is obviously bigger on this map than it is in the regular map that shows it by geographic size.
Yes.
Interesting.
Yeah.
It's a funky map.
It takes a little getting used to, but once you've looked at it a few times you can see what the states are and you can just see general patterns of dots.
Yeah, let's talk about the regions, because some of them overlap when you're describing a word in the dictionary, but you sort of break the country down into these linguistic regions.
So can you talk about maybe the big ones and what the differences are?
Yes, there are several of that are very common and somewhat distinct, and you won't be surprised to know that New England is one or that the Northeast in general is one and that the South is another the South Atlantic, the Gulf, South.
When you get further west, the regions are less distinct.
And they do certainly overlap.
For instance what we call inland north.
The north part of the country west of New England overlaps with the north central.
And then as you get to the west, the Rocky Mountains sometimes overlap with the plains states.
And Pacific Northwest sometimes has Rocky Mountain states.
So it becomes a little bit trickier and very often our regional labels don't just say South or New England or Pennsylvania, because there are usually dots that are a little bit outside of the basic pattern.
So we say chiefly New England but scattered elsewhere, or chiefly South Midland, just whatever the dots show.
Mm-hmm.
Dragonfly is another really fun word.
I had no idea there are so many names for the dragonfly.
There are 77 synonyms for the dragonfly in here.
Yes.
And those words are really wonderful because they give a snapshot of historical folklore superstitions about what this little creature does to people.
Yeah.
Ear cutter was one that was particularly frightening that jumped out at me.
And ear sower.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're attacking children's ears.
Yes.
And, oh gosh, you probably have the list right there.
Yeah.
Another one that I loved was called a darning needle, because it flits back and forth over the same spot like a darning needle going over a hole in the sock.
Yeah.
Helicopter.
That was, you know, pretty descriptive.
Maybe not too exciting.
Yeah.
But I noticed on the map or the entry for Dragonfly, it had a code.
It had INF and then NH18.
And I was wondering, does that mean New Hampshire?
What does that mean?
Yes, the INF refers to the specific person, the informant, who was interviewed and answered that particular question.
So yes, it was informant New Hampshire 14.
Wow.
Wow.
And so that's a great lead-in to talk about how this information was gathered.
Yeah.
It was a very massive fieldwork project where first the communities were selected 1002 communities because Fred Cassidy, who was responsible for this, said well, you know, we'll try to get 1000 communities, but we might miss a couple, so let's do 1000 then too.
But they all worked out.
And they were chosen to select the relative population densities across the country.
And Field workers, that is, usually graduate students, sometimes faculty members were assigned particular communities and they had to go there knowing no one and find people who had lived there all their lives who would be willing to answer the questions in this huge questionnaire.
There were 1,600 and some questions.
Oh, my gosh.
So finding someone who had lived there all their lives, who was willing to answer that number of questions, was often just impossible.
So the field worker would have to find two or three, sometimes even four or five people who would be willing to split up the questionnaire.
They might say well, I can talk about foods and family and household things, but talk to Mr Jones down the road about hunting and fishing and that kind of thing.
So in each case, we knew that the details about age sex race, amount of education and community type, which meant that, in addition to showing where these people were on the map, we could also analyze the social characteristics
So in addition to saying this is chiefly New England, we could also say especially among older people, ie over 60, or especially among women or older, particularly among people with little formal education.
So it's a social analysis as well as a regional one.
So they spread out across the country in these word wagons.
I'm trying to imagine where you would even begin when you arrive in a town.
Did they tend to go to the library or the grocery store?
Where did people find the most success trying to find people?
Well, it varied by part of the country.
One of our best field workers was sent to the South.
He was from Arkansas, so he had a sort of Midland dialect, which wasn't as unusual in the South as it would have been if the field worker had been from Wisconsin.
But he learned because this was during the Vietnam War and there was a lot of social agitation about different opinions on the war.
He knew that going there with this green word wagon saying University of Wisconsin on the side, he could rile some people up.
So his idea was to go first to the sheriff.
And tell him what he was doing and explain it and get some cred behind his presence.
And that helped a lot.
And the sheriff himself, or rarely herself, could suggest people who were longtime residents and who might be willing to help.
It turned out that librarians were not always the best people, because they would tend to say oh, Mrs So-and-so is so well-educated and she knows all the words.
Go talk to her.
But that's not what we wanted.
We wanted the local words, not the educated words.
So field workers developed their own techniques, and often they found that nursing homes were good places, not only because people were old and had memories of words that were used decades earlier, but also because they had more time.
That makes sense.
Did you go out in the field yourself?
I didn't for DARE, but I did for another project called the Dialect Survey of Rural Georgia.
It was a different survey, but used the same kinds of techniques.
Mm-hmm.
So for DARE, they also looked at pronunciation as well as different words too, right?
Oh, yes, definitely.
And to get pronunciations.
Field workers would write transcriptions sometimes, but a better source was recordings.
And this is hard to believe, but in 1965 there were people who were afraid of tape recorders, had never heard their own voices and were extremely reluctant to do this.
A few people just said, no, I'm not going to.
But most people ultimately realized that this could be fun and agreed to do two things.
One was to read a silly little story called Arthur the Rat that was developed to elicit all of the important contrasts and vowels and consonants in American English.
So if we had these recordings from the whole country, we could systematically compare pronunciations across the whole United States.
And that was very valuable.
But at the same time the field workers asked people to just talk about anything that interested them.
And that way we got a good conversational sample as well.
Let's hear a recording of some of the Arthur the Rat stories.
The story of Arthur the Rat.
Once upon a time, there was a young rat who couldn't make up his mind.
Whenever the other rats asked him if he would like to come out hunting with them, he would answer in a hoarse voice I don't know.
And when they said, would you rather stay inside, he would say yes or no either.
He'd always shake making a choice.
One fine day his Aunt Josephine said to him, now look here.
No one will ever care for you if you carry on like this.
You have no more mind of your own than a greasy old blade of grass.
The young rat coughed and looked quiet as usual, but said nothing.
Don't you think so, said his aunt, stamping her foot, for she couldn't bear to see the young rat so cold-blooded.
I don't know, was all he ever answered.
And then he walked off to think. for an hour or more.
Rather he would stay in his hole in the ground or go out into the loft.
One night the rats heard a loud noise in the loft.
It was a very dreary old place.
The roof let the rain come down, come washing in.
The beams and the rafters had all rotted through.
So the whole thing was quite unsafe.
At last one of the joists gave way, and the beams fell with one edge on the floor.
The walls shook, the cupola fell off, and all the rats' hair stood on end with fear and horror.
This won't do, city leaders.
We can't stay cooped up here any longer.
So it's a nice case to search for a new home.
A little later on that evening his cats come back and said they had found an old-fashioned horse barn where there would be room and board for all of them.
The leader gave the order at once, company falling in, and the rats crawled out of the hole right away and stood on the floor in a long line.
Just then, the old rat caught sight of young Arthur.
That was the name of the shaker.
He wasn't in the line, and he wasn't exactly outside it.
He stood just by it.
Come on, get in line, growled the old rat coarsely.
Of course you're coming too.
I don't know, said Arthur calmly.
Why, the idea of it.
You don't think it's safe here anymore, do you?
I'm not certain, said Arthur undaunted.
The roof may not fall down yet.
Well, said the old rat, you can't wait for you to join us.
Then he turned to the other and shouted right about the face, Mark.
And the long line marched out the barn while the young rat watched him.
I think I'll go tomorrow, he said to himself.
But then again, perhaps I won't.
It's so nice and snug here.
I guess I'll go back to my hole under the log for a while. just to make up my mind.
But during the night there was a big crash.
Down came beams, rafters, joists, the whole business.
Next morning, it was a foggy day, some men came to look over the damage.
It seemed odd to them that the old building was not haunted by rats.
But at last one of them happened to move aboard and he caught sight of a young rat quite dead, half in and half out of his hole.
Thus, the shirker got his due and there was no mourning for him.
And then you looked at individual pronunciations as well, right?
Yes.
And using those transcriptions, some of which came from the actual recordings, we could make maps of pronunciations as well as of lexical items.
Yeah.
One of the words I noticed in my volume two was evening, but it was pronounced differently, like ebenin.
So not only was it surprising to me that evening in some part of the country I think I failed to write it down but any time after noon could be considered evening.
So you know, if someone said I'm going to come over this evening in a different part of the country from where I live, they might show up at 1 pm, which would be a big surprise to me.
Yeah.
Well, I had that very same experience doing fieldwork in Georgia.
I was interviewing a woman in the morning and it got to be noon and she said I'm sorry I'm going to have to break this up because I have plans to meet someone for lunch.
So please come back this evening.
And my heart just fell because I wanted to get on the road to get back to Atlanta, and before the traffic,
So I cooled my heels till about 4.30, which was the earliest I could consider evening.
And I went back and she was terribly distressed because she thought I had left.
Because for her, evening was at about one o'clock.
Just right after lunch.
No, that was one of my first lessons in regional differences.
Yeah.
I love it.
We have a fun story of a woman from New York who was recorded telling a story about being caught up in some bootlegging.
Oh, going to Cuba.
I went to Cuba on Prohibition time, too.
And I bought a lot of fancy bottles, like one drink in for souvenirs. all my friends.
Well, Atlantic City, the ship was stopped.
It was all in the newspapers about it, too.
The crew had ripped the walls and put all liquor in the walls.
So we all had to get up, 3 o'clock in the morning, and, oh, it was a scream.
The men were coming down in their pajamas and bathrobes and they had bottles sticking all out all over.
And anyone could see they had the bottles.
And, oh, the captain says, get rid of that stuff.
They're searching the boats.
They're downstairs ripping the wall apart.
So they looked us all over for liquor and for bringing things in from Cuba.
And The girl in front of me.
She had a bottle she was bringing in from her mother-in-law and they found that bottle in her bag.
So they found her $50 and threw it over the side of the boat.
So then I got panicky because I had about six little bottles and I thought I'll have to stay on boat and wash the dishes.
I spent all my money down there.
It was coming home broke.
So the doctors are not allowed to touch the women.
They send you down to the matron.
So when he went to examine me, he said, you're a very sick woman.
You better go down to the matron.
See, I was so nervous and upset that my pulse was going so fast.
And I couldn't talk.
And I was holding my coat around my stomach, see, so they wouldn't.
And I guess he thought I was pregnant, see, because the bottles all started to move to the front.
So he says, oh, you look like a sick woman.
You better go down to the matron.
And all I kept thinking about was oh, if they ever find those bottles, I'll have to stay on ship a month to pay up for it.
They fine you 50 a bottle.
I think I had eight.
And I was broke because I'd been down there a month and I'd spent my money.
So what happened?
And she didn't examine me.
She said, what's the matter?
Oh, I said, I'm so nervous.
I said, those doctors, they're fooling around.
I said, My friend in front, they threw the bottle overboard, and I got all nervous and upset.
And she says, well, I'll give you a pill, and you calm down.
So then she got the gun.
But I would never bring liquor in again after that.
I wouldn't go through that again for no souvenirs.
And so these wonderful pronunciations, you know, sort of lead me into thinking about who is using DARE, the Dictionary of American Regional English.
How are these pronunciations, you know, helping your readers and users?
Well, I have to say that probably it's the lexical items, more than the pronunciations, that help, have been particularly useful, but it has really surprised us that DARE can be extremely useful to physicians.
So I had a letter from a man who said he had grown up in New England, gone to medical school in Maine and his first position was in Western Pennsylvania.
And one of his first patients said Doc, I've been rifting and I got jags in my leaders out, no idea.
But it turns out that because this was western Pennsylvania, which is heavily settled by Scotland, rift in Scottish means to belch or burp.
And to have jags in his leaders meant to have pains in the tendons in his neck.
So he'd been burping too much and hurt the tendons in his neck.
Amazing.
So the doctor looked that up in DARE and figured out what his patient was talking about.
Well, unfortunately DARE wasn't ready then, but he ultimately learned and told us about his experience.
Amazing.
It's true of any physician who grows up in one area and then finds himself or herself posted to someplace very different.
So what would you do if your patient said, look, I've got the ground itch.
I've gotten dew poison.
I've got salt room.
Oh, no.
Leaders, poems, kernels.
What are they?
Well, if this doctor had dare, you're right.
He or she could go look it up and then know what questions to ask.
Why?
Those that have ground itch and dew poise are skin irritations or inflammations or cracks, based on the idea that if you go out in the morning where there's still dew on the grass and you're in your bare feet, you can get various kinds of critters or infections.
Oh, how interesting.
Yeah, some that jumped out at me that I thought might be interesting to a doctor.
Were that you know so many of these, I would never guess what the meaning is.
So to fall off or fall off is to lose weight in the South.
And I think the Southern Midland region, I never would have guessed.
You said, oh, she's fallen off recently.
Yeah.
Never would I think that was losing weight.
And then fall out can be to burst out laughing, but it can also be to lose consciousness.
So if you say someone fell out, you know I might think they fell out of a car or something, but no, it means they passed out.
Yeah.
And these kinds of things are just great illustrations of how regionalism still survives.
And it doesn't make sense to say that the U.S. has become homogenized in terms of its language.
That's something people like to say.
They say, oh, we all use the Internet.
We watch the same podcasts and television shows.
So we all sound the same.
But no, there are still many, many differences.
And it's funny to realize that things we say naturally aren't always understood by other people.
So surprising.
And another one that I don't think I would have guessed.
Maybe in retrospect this makes more sense, but a French harp is our harmonica.
Yes.
And we have a really interesting also medical story about that.
We got a phone call from a psychiatrist in Chicago who wondered what we could tell him about the words Tom Walker's harp and mouth organ.
Well, it turns out that we have a great map for tomwalkers, which are stilts.
And oath, harp, and mouth organ are regional terms for the harmonica.
Well, it turns out that there's a book called The Boston Naming Test, and it's used to try to diagnose aphasia or a disease where people can't come up with names for things.
And so they have all these pictures of items and the patients are supposed to give a name to them.
Well, the people who made that book had no idea about regional English.
And so if a person said stilts were Tommy Walkers, they were marked wrong.
If they called a harmonica a mouth organ or a harp, they were marked wrong.
So people were just misdiagnosed all over the place by the fact that the makers of the test didn't accept any other terms.
It was particularly interesting to find that this test was used in the U.S.
Army.
Where can you get a more diverse population than the U.S.
Army?
And when we discovered that it was being used in this way, we tried to get in touch with the people who made the test and let them know that we could help them.
And at first they seemed interested, but later every attempt to reach them was just rejected.
So I don't believe the test has ever been updated to acknowledge regional variation.
Wow, that's terrible.
So people might be being diagnosed as having dementia because they're using regionalisms?
Yeah.
That's terrible.
It's really horrible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know the French harp.
I was surprised that it wasn't more localized around regions with French influence, like maybe New Orleans, also known for its music.
But it did remind me that so many of the words we use are influenced by the early settlers in the regions.
So what are some examples of that?
Oh, well, many of them are food terms that reflect the immigrants who came to a particular region.
In the Upper Midwest.
It's particularly fun to realize how many different ethnic populations came here.
So, for instance, if you ask about local foods or what desserts do people eat here, what do you call a dish made of cabbage and that kind of thing, you find that in the Upper Midwest it's full of things like kringle and kraut and kolachki and kielbasa and lots of German and Norwegian and Polish, Swedish and other terms just reflecting the large numbers of immigrants.
But if you go elsewhere, you might find words from Native American languages.
And that's true of one you just mentioned earlier, which is the Paganip.
Very dense fog that makes it practically impossible to see if you're driving through the mountains.
And that comes from, I think it's Paiute language.
That one jumped out at me too, because so I went to school at UC Santa Cruz and there's an open space park called Pogonip.
And so I always assumed it was from sort of Northern California.
But I also lived in Nevada, which is supposedly where that term is from, from the fog that they get in parts of Nevada.
Right. but I never heard it when I lived in Nevada.
And this happens to me when I post about regionalisms online sometimes.
There will always be someone who said you know, if I'm posting about something that's I don't know common in the South, they'll be like.
Well, I live in the South and I never heard that word.
And then there'll be someone who's from Seattle and they'll be like well, I live in Seattle and my family uses that word all the time.
And so I imagine you run up against that too.
Like, what do you tell people?
Well, life changes and that sometimes there's kind of a convergent evolution.
It just happens.
And people move, you know.
Yes, definitely.
Yeah.
I found two websites for DARE.
I know the project has slowed down, but is still being updated.
And one of the websites did have like the late 2025 update.
Can you talk maybe about the current status of the project and explain maybe the two different websites?
Yes.
As you might guess, finding funding for this project was a very difficult part of the whole process.
And by the time we had actually published the last version and the digital edition, it was clear that funders were saying we got you this far, but we just can't help you any further.
So funding eventually just trickled off to nothing.
And my successor as chief editor, George Gable, was not willing to let it go.
He knew that we needed to keep going and updating things.
So as a volunteer, he has been providing what we call quarterly updates.
And he's been concentrating on volume one because that was published in 1985.
And that was before we had any digital resources.
So to go back and use all that's available now and update those entries was really important.
Sometimes he could find quotes that antedated our earliest one by 100 years.
Wow.
So he has been doing that four times a year.
I read them and we talk about them and then he posts them on the DARE website.
And Harvard Press is supposed to be incorporating those into the digital edition on an annual basis.
So those are actually on the DARE website, which is dare.wisc.edu.
And in the digital edition, it's called daredictionary.com.
And that is Harvard Press's digital edition.
And unfortunately, it's not free and not as many libraries as we had hoped subscribe to it.
It's possible to get a personal copy for 50 a year, but we're sorry that it's that much, because I know that that seems like a lot.
Yeah.
But when you think of that, people are volunteering their time to keep it going.
I mean, that's heroic, but it also shouldn't have to be that way.
Yeah.
And so you can get a personal subscription for forty nine dollars a year.
Or, you know, you could ask your library to get an institutional subscription too, and you could access it that way.
I like having the book.
It's nice.
But the digital version gives you access to all those recordings which you know is wonderful to be able to click on.
You know some of the references and hear the recordings of the people saying the sentences that have the words in them.
Yeah, it makes it come alive.
It really does.
Well, Joan, thank you so much for being here.
It's a delight to talk to you about DARE, the Dictionary of American Regional English.
Well, it's been my pleasure.
Thank you.
You bet.
And for our Grammarpalusians.
We're going to have a bonus segment where I'm going to ask Joan about some of her personal favorite words, how she got started with DARE and language research in general.
And if you would like to access that bonus material, you can sign up at patreoncom.
Slash grammar girl.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
