Harvard University Press Blog

A Round of DAREderdash

We published the first volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English back in 1985. Volumes came every few years after that, and next year we’ll finally roll out Volume V, which will take us alphabetically from Si through Z.

Just last week Joan Houston Hall, the Chief Editor for the series, announced via Twitter that all of the data for DARE Volume V has been delivered to us at the Press. To celebrate that milestone, let’s have a little Balderdash-style fun. You guys know Balderdash, yeah? Toss out an obscure word, everybody makes up their own definitions, then they’re read aloud along with the actual definition and each player has to guess which one is correct. We stole part of the fun and made up the fakes, so you just have to guess the real definitions. All of these words came via the @darewords Twitter account, which you really should be following.

All right, let’s play some DAREderdash. Answers are below.

all horns and rattles:

(a) very angry

(b) in heat

(c) lacking depth or substance

(d) noisy

foop:

(a) a variety of fungus

(b) to dance uninhibitedly

(c) generic term for sugary cereal

(d) to make a mistake, to flub

blind tiger:

(a) one who lashes out indiscriminately

(b) a game of hide-and-seek played in the dark

(c) a speakeasy

(d) a practical joke

guffins:

(a) very large feet

(b) pigeons

(c) fussy toddlers

(d) jokers

footermans:

(a) on foot

(b) cement workers

(c) podiatrists

(d) soccer players

Tweeting American Regional English

This morning I was on my beanwater until I got a schnibble of flannel cake caught in my goozle. I should’ve pungled for that larrupin' kolacky instead.

Say what now?

Here it is again: This morning I was feeling lively until I got a small piece of pancake caught in my throat. I should’ve shelled out for that delicious sweet-toppinged pastry instead.

To understand that patchwork of linguistic curiosities up top you’d have to be versed in the dialects of New England, the Appalachians, the upper Midwest, Texas, German settlement areas, and the West. Or, you could just follow the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) on twitter. All those gems up there have helped to make @darewords one of my favorite follows in just the two months that it’s been active.

Offline, the Dictionary of American Regional English exists as a highly esteemed multi-volume reference work that documents words, phrases, and pronunciations as they vary from place to place across the United States. The books are the result of face-to-face interviews carried out in all 50 states, and of analysis of a comprehensive collection of written materials like diaries, letters, novels, newspapers, histories, and government documents that cover our history from the colonial period to the present.

The first volume, covering A through C, was released in 1985. The fifth and final, for which Joan Houston Hall is again the Chief Editor, takes us from Si through Z and is due in 2012. These books are the end result of a process that began way back in 1889 with the founding of the American Dialect Society, as explained in this history on the DARE website. Despite being reference works, though, these books aren’t meant to collect flug in the rumpelkammer. They’re the toast of any gathering of American linguists, sure, but the DARE books have also proven extremely useful to librarians, teachers, historians, journalists, playwrights, detectives, physicians, psychologists, and dialect coaches, among others. So you can understand the excitement over the approaching fifth volume, which will finally complete this presentation of American Regional English from A to izzard.

Until that time, though, follow the @darewords twitter feed for a word a day. And do so in the knowledge that your very presence on twitter is helping to both document and propagate regional slang. As reported earlier this month by the Chronicle of Higher Education, researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a computer program to analyze the language of tweets, through which they can determine the location of a Twitter user in the United States with a median error of roughly 300 miles. Regional English, alive and well.

(UPDATE: DARE Volume V is now available!)

Onward and upward with the Dictionary of American Regional English

An AP writer profiles our wicked awesome Dictionary of American Regional English, published in conjunction with a dedicated editorial team headed by Joan Houston Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. DARE is the book that can tell you, among other things, where your vaguely Italian-themed sandwich is a "hoagie" and where it becomes a "hero" or "grinder."

You will learn from the article that DARE founding editor Frederic Cassidy was an awesome guy -- in 1965 he sent researchers to over a thousand US communities to record the inhabitants' speech. When they returned with the data, he and his editorial team set to work producing four mammoth volumes that, considering that they are at heart reference books, make incredibly fascinating reading (no less a wordsmith than Tom Wolfe says DARE is his favorite thing to read). Thirty-five years later, Cassidy died still awaiting completion of the fifth and final volume of DARE, to be published next year. But before Cassidy passed away, he made sure that people would know he kept his eye on the prize -- his tombstone reads "On to Z!"

||| PBS special on DARE