Pennsylvania’s boilo

Boy howdy! The Dictionary of American Regional English has done it again — issued its quarterly online update, this one dated Winter 2017. It includes boy howdy as well as bowery, a place where you go for a bowery dance. And you can look it all up for free.

If you’re in the South, the central states, or the Southwest, chances are you’ve heard boy howdy. DARE has examples going back as far as a century ago, with the comment “The exclaim use seems to have arisen, or at least become popularized, among soldiers during WWI.” As evidence, the dictionary quotes a 1918 issue of Iowa’s Muscatine Journal: “The size of the Journal staff, so far as young men of military age are concerned, is shrinking alarmingly, but, boy howdy, look how the army’s growing.”

DARE finds bowery dances in the north-central states. They are dances held in a bowery, a name originally used in the north and north midlands, nowadays especially heard in the Rocky Mountains. The extensive quotations from published sources showing the use of bowery include a 1976 quotation from the Salt Lake Tribune, in Utah, a dispatch from Granite Park: “It took the early birds to get the choice reservations Friday for boweries and buildings operated by the Salt Lake County Recreation Department.”

And what’s a bowery dance? DARE quotes a description from the dictionary’s home state of Wisconsin, dated 1951: “Young people of neighborhood lay a board floor out under the trees, erect a roof frame over it and roof it with boughs, and give free dances with beer; collection paid for fiddler and beer, and what was left over paid the cleaner-uppers.”

Then there’s the boar’s nest, what we nowadays would call a man-cave: “Living quarters inhabited by men only, or a solitary man, generally under disorderly or uncivilized conditions,” as DARE puts it. It was heard especially in the West.

Boilo, on the other hand, is a term from eastern Pennsylvania for — well, here’s a 2016 citation caught on the internet: “a popular homemade Yuletide beverage. Ingredients include orange and lemon juice, honey, cloves, caraway seeds, and large amounts of whiskey. Served hot in shot glasses. Many families have their own particular recipes. … ”

In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, booya is stewed meat with vegetables, or “an occasion at which this is served.”

Some New Englanders used to braid a mixture when cooking, what would nowadays be called stirring.

I could go on and on, but this is enough to give a taste of Editor George Goebel’s new and revised entries, some 16 of each. They are supported by rich evidence, often a dozen citations from earliest known to the present. Among other things, there are plants (branch lettuce) and fish (eight kinds of bream) and a meal called bread and with it.

It all goes to show that print publication of the big six-volume dictionary didn’t stop old regionalisms from being discovered and new ones from being created. Tour these pages and see for yourself.

Maria Edgeworth

I texted my wife the other day asking whether she had walked the dog. She answered, “Done and done.” I was like, “Wait — what and what??”

The truth is, the expression, indicating a task accomplished, did have a bit of a familiar ring to it. Going to Google News, I find these examples just in the last 10 days:

• “I also believe it’s a particularly good match for the free-weekend treatment. You get in, you hopefully have a good time, and you get out. Done and done.” –Destructoid, on a game called Steep.
• “First, duh, we just replace the iceberg that the Titanic crashed into with a giant, ocean-based creature. Bang. Done and done.” –article on The Ringer about putting giant animals into classic movies.
• “Pink suitcases that could fit everything and still be light — done and done. The opportunity to extend the pastel world is so exciting for us.” –Poppy James, of luggage maker Pop+Suki, in Teen Vogue
• The Princeton University basketball team owns “the spotless 14-0 conference record, and a 17-game winning streak. If this were yesterday, they’d own a bid to the NCAA Tournament, all done and done.”  –NCAA.com

In January, the New York Times television critic James Poniewozik wrote about Donald Trump’s reality-TV-style approach to the issues of the day: “And what does ‘ending conflict of interest’ look like? A lawyer says the word ‘trust’ a bunch of times, and there’s a big pile of documents. Done and done!”

These and other examples comprise two categories: cases where more than one task has been completed (so that the first “done” refers to one thing and the second another), and cases where it’s just one task (in which the second “done” is rhetorically redundant).

The expression doesn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary or Green’s Dictionary of Slang. However, the website World Wide Words investigated it in 2004 and found its first appearance in the novel Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth, published in 1800: “‘Done,’ says my master; ‘I’ll lay you a hundred golden guineas to a tester you don’t.’ ‘Done,’ says the gauger; and done and done’s enough between two gentlemen.”

World Wide Words explains that tester is “a slang term for sixpence” and  gauger “an exciseman’s assistant who checked the capacity of casks.” It goes on:

… it seems that the usual convention was that a bet was agreed on the mere word of the two principals if both said “done.” They both being gentlemen, or assumed to be such, their word was their bond and there was no question of going back on the agreement once it had been made. Hence “done and done” meant that a binding agreement had been mutually accepted.

A half century after Edgeworth’s book, the expression seems to have become established, as well as crossed the Atlantic. From James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater (1848): “Done and done between gentlemen, is enough, sir.”

But the current use of the expression has a different meaning — “Done thoroughly and satisfactorily,” as Wiktionary puts it. Wiktionary’s first citation for it is a short story called “A Natural Notion,” by David Seybold, included in the 1985 book Seasons of the Hunter: An Anthology, edited by Seybold and Robert Elman: “Done and done, he said to himself. And he felt pretty good. The anger and hurt that only a few hours before had been sharp and deep had dulled.”

My sense is that this second meaning of done and done took hold after the turn of the 21st century and has really taken off in the last few years. And my hypothesis is that its popularity sprang from another, similar sounding expression, done and dusted, which I covered in 2015 on my blog Not One-Off Britishisms:

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the phrase as meaning “completely finished or ready.” Its citations are all from British sources, starting with the British Bee Journal, which had this line in 1953: “All to be done and dusted before the National Honey Show. After this the grand clear up.”

Done and dusted, which appears to have originated as a Northwest England regionalism, became in vogue in the 1990s Britain, but still hasn’t achieved much popularity in the United States, as this Google Ngram Viewer graph shows:

So here’s the hypothesis. Done and dusted is a useful expression, the alliterative double verb giving strong emphasis to the idea of a job completed. But it sounds too, well, British, for Americans to want to use it, at least for the time being. So we Yanks cleverly resurrected a similar-sounding older phrase, and cleverly assigned to it the same meaning as done and dusted.

The done and done question?

Done and done.

Say what you will about it, either deserves a second look. Or a second hearing. And neither too, for that matter.

In a usage book like Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage, you’ll see that in its written form, either presents usage experts with conundrums, having to do with meaning and verb agreement. Even to summarize those discussions would occupy more space than this entire column, so forget about that. What I’m interested in is a simpler yet more mysterious matter: how you say it.

That is, do you pronounce it EEther or AYEther? Why? And which pronunciation is the proper one?

That last question is easily answered. Both pronunciations are widely used and fully valid. But what makes a person choose one form or another?

The Dictionary of American Regional English offers some guidance. American pronunciation, we learn, is usually EE. But also especially in urban areas of the Northeast, especially among well-educated speakers, AYE is to be found, though AYE is “often considered affected.”

DARE quotes from the Linguistic Atlas of New England, published in the 1940s: AYE “is natural to a small number of younger and educated informants; it is regarded as affected or amusing by several others, and as old-fashioned (perhaps rather unfamiliar or unusual) by some others, especially in Maine.” And a 1961 study of pronunciation in the Atlantic states concluded that AYE “is distinctly a sporadic feature of the cultivated speech of Metropolitan New York and Philadelphia. …  It is in all probability a recent adoption from British English.”

So much for the experts. That’s the 20th-century situation. What about now?

I asked students in a class of mine here in the middle of Illinois. Not surprisingly, most said they said EE. But a few said AYE, and they weren’t the ones I might have identified as “affected.”

To my surprise, a couple of students said they used both pronunciations. They couldn’t say what particular situations would call for one or the other.

Even more puzzling was this unheard-of situation that I heard of while at the Virginia Festival of the Book last month. An author from EE territory in Chicago said that her whole family used EE — she and her spouse, her children ages 15 and 9, except not her 4-year-old. That child always says AYEther. But where has she even heard it, let alone determined to use it against family norms?

And are EE and AYE ever in free variation? Or is there any conditioning factor that at least partly determines which pronunciation a person will use?

It’s a mystery. I don’t have the answer. I hope you do.

The eighth in what we hope will be an unending series of online updates for the Dictionary of American Regional English is now available, free, to all who wonder what else there is to say about the varieties of American English vocabulary already caught in the six massive print volumes of the dictionary.

This eighth update shows there is always plenty to be added, and always will be, as long as we continue speaking (or writing) American English in an endless variety of ways.

But first, some good news about the online version of the dictionary, published by Harvard University Press. First, it has recently been updated to include the first six updates, as well as other corrections and changes; second, the subscription price has been cut in half, to $49.You can visit the Harvard University Press website to subscribe.

Editor George Goebel has been concentrating on his ABCs, because the first volume, covering those letters, was published back in 1985 and hence is most in need of updating. But he’s not limited to the start of the alphabet.

So this time, Goebel says his favorite new quotation is in the revised entry for simples, meaning “foolishness or silliness regarded facetiously as a disease,” along with “bore for the simples,” “to subject to an imaginary surgical operation supposed to cure folly.”

Goebel quotes from a 2005 issue of the Missouri Conservationist: “I remember helping an old man skin a beaver, back when limited beaver trapping was first allowed. ‘A man who would do this for a livin’, he said wryly, ‘had ort to be bored for the simples. I purely hate it.’”

But back to the ABCs. There’s kind of party once known in Missouri (and elsewhere) as a bounce-around, where young people bounce around playing games, singing, dancing, even kissing — also known in the Midlands and Texas as a “play party.” Where dancing was frowned on, they played games instead that were suspiciously like dancing, what DARE calls “quasi-dancing.”

The updated dictionary now has 10 separate entries for varieties of crayfish — or rather, separate entries for 10 different names for the creature known as crayfish: craw, crawcrab, crawdab, crawdad, crawjinny, crawldad, crawlfish, crawpappy, crowdad.

A welcome sign of spring is bear’s lettuce, a kind of lettuce saxifrage supposedly enjoyed by bears coming out of hibernation. It’s also known (in southwestern Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Virginia) as groundhog salad and in southwestern Pennsylvania, deer tongue.

If you’re thirsty in Georgia or Florida, you can try cane skimmings, a home brew made from sugar cane; in Detroit, a boomba of beer. If you’re hungry in places like Wyoming or Missouri, you might care for a bite of brick mush. But you’d really have to be hungry for that. Bon appetit!

What happens when you take 50 people who make or study dictionaries and land them on a remote Caribbean island?

The Dictionary Society of North America provided an answer to that question last week, when it held its three-day biennial meeting not within the United States or Canada, as it had all 20 times before, but in the Caribbean, on the island of Barbados.

And that made a difference. The distance from North America discouraged some North Americans from making the trip. On the other hand, the Caribbean location made attendance possible for Caribbean researchers and students who would not have been able to make it to one of DSNA’s usual sites, like Indiana University. And in Barbados, there was much greater ethnic diversity among DSNA meeting participants than usual.

What’s more, reflecting the interests of the participants, the program paid particular attention to Caribbean lexicography. There is much to do, and much being done, to make dictionaries for the different Caribbean islands. Many, if not most, of them are English-speaking, having been ruled by England for centuries, but along with official English there are local dialects that need their dictionaries too.

So for example we had a report from Caroline Myrick of North Carolina State University, who is studying the language of the little island of Saba, renowned for scuba diving. It has a population of barely 2,000, but living in four towns with four distinctive dialects.

And there is a need for overall dictionaries to compare and contrast the various island dialects. One of them, published in 2003, is Jeannette Allsopp’s Caribbean Multilingual Dictionary of Flora, Fauna and Foods in English, French, French Creole and Spanish. She is working on a new edition.

Among the important reasons for making dictionaries is saving the world. Pamela Faber of the University of Granada told about EcoLexicon, a project of the LexiCon Research Group at that university.

It’s a free online visual thesaurus of vocabulary, in six languages, having to do with the environment. It takes some practice to get used to the functions of the thesaurus, but fortunately it has a detailed user manual.

And for something quite different, Lisa Berglund of Buffalo State, in the State University of New York system, went around literally looking in dictionaries of the early 19th century to see what she could find there. Her collection so far includes everything but the kitchen sink: flowers, leaves, fabric, newspaper clippings.

The setting was the luxury Accra hotel. A large meandering swimming pool was just outside, and a sandy ocean beach just beyond that, with a convenient bar. Sometimes it was hard to keep from being distracted. But it was clear that there would be plenty to discuss two years from now, when the setting indeed will be Bloomington, Ind.

Often I pay attention to a shift in language only when I find it coming from my own mouth. That was the case the other day, when my husband and I were hiking in the Berkshire hills. He caught his toe in a tree root and started pitching down the hill, but managed to veer right and swing around a slender birch until he steadied himself. “That was clumsy of me,” he said.

“But you managed to right yourself like a ballet dancer,” I said. “Good—”

Right then I felt the new set of words, ready to come out of my mouth: on you.

“Good job!” I said. We continued downhill, but as I watched my step among the various roots and rocks that are the hallmark of hiking trails in this part of the country, my mind drifted to the phrase Good on you. Once upon a time, I would have said Good for you. What had changed? And why?

Ask a person of a certain age, and they will probably tell you that Good on you is Australian slang, pronounced and emphasized mostly as Good ON ya. In fact, apparently in some parts of Australia the expression can be neatly shortened to Onya! Ask a younger person, though, and you’ll hear a distinction that has nothing to do with nationality or region and everything to do with intent.

If I back up my own timeline to, say, 20 years ago, I would have said to my husband, “Good for you!” I would have used the same expression if he had come home with the news that he had won the raffle at an office party. In other words, I would have said “Good for you!” to mean either “Well done!” or “How lucky!” When I spoke to a couple of millennials this week about Good on you, they confirmed what I suspected: These two meanings have now taken different paths. The appropriate response to my husband’s clever footwork on the downhill path would be Good on you. The response in regard to the raffle, unless I believed he had earned the prize in some way, like by a years-long perseverance in buying raffle tickets, would be Good for you.

And now that the phrase has been uncoupled, as it were, Good for you finds itself increasingly used sarcastically. As one American contributor to an online discussion explained, it can easily mean, not Congratulations! But Eat my shorts! You are certainly full of yourself, you worm turd. Conversely, Good on you can extend a moral approbation, as in this exchange from a recently published story by Laura van den Berg:

We boarded the ship in Miami. We are going to Cozumel because our mother loved that part of Mexico, and we are going the way we are going because she loved cruise ships, too. She took two a year, always to Cozumel, always on the most monstrously large ships available, a thousand feet long and fourteen stories high, with names like DESTINY and SUNSHINE. She would have loved the ship my sister and I have chosen. At first, people think we’re a couple. Good on you! they say.

Or take Alex Bledsoe’s noir novel, He Drank, and Saw the Spider:

“You killed the bear?”
“Yes.”
“Single-handedly?”
“No, I used both hands.”
Isidore shrieked again. She thought it over. “Well, good on you, sir. Bears eat sheep, and sheep feed us, so we’re always glad for fewer bears.”

Good for you has not completely lost its sincere meaning, but we see it increasingly used snidely, as in this exchange between Hoda Kotb and her co-host on the Today show, Kathie Lee Gifford:

HODA KOTB: How often do you guys do your sheets?
KATHIE LEE GIFFORD: Twice a week.
HODA KOTB: Twice?
KATHIE LEE GIFFORD: Yes.
HODA KOTB: Oh, well. OK. Goody — good for you. Goody for you.

Or in this bit of dialogue from Fiona Maazel’s recent story “Dad’s Just a Number,” where context is everything:

After a while, I said, “I’m not a liar. I’ve never lied about anything.” I went on to say I had no secrets. And that I’ d even been up front with her about sperm donation, which I could imagine a lesser guy being cagey about.
“Wow,” she said. “Good for you.”
“Vi. Come on.” I took her hand.

Of course Good for you retains its hortatory sense, as in the reason children should eat their peas. And Good on you retains its fashion sense (“That dress looks good on you”), which creates the double-entendre of the app Good On You, whose mission statement explains: “Our shopping choices have a huge impact on how businesses treat people, the planet and animals. So we created the Good On You app to make it easy for anyone, anywhere, to shop to their values.”

My colleague Ben Yagoda began noticing the drift of Good on you from Australian to American English some six years ago, and all I can say is that if I’m starting to use it, the trend must be increasing. Perhaps, as my other colleague Bill Germano suggested, “Good [  ] you is where on went when it decamped from based on, a usage that now seems practically extinct.” Those prepositions do seem to find their way, don’t they? Good on them.

Chronicle illustration by Ellen Winkler

If you read my posts, you may be familiar by now with the grand six-volume Dictionary of American Regional English, completed in print in 2013, but continuing to live beyond that date in quarterly updates on the internet.

Now DARE  has come to life in another way. It’s not just in writing that the dictionary tells us about the different ways we talk in this vast country. DARE  is speaking up!

Now we can hear the recorded voices of some 1,800 people in 1,002 communities in all 50 states who were interviewed between 1965 and 1970 by field workers driving “word wagons” with bulky recording equipment. The researchers used a lengthy paper questionnaire to note what people said, but they also asked if the interviewees would allow taped recordings, and the great majority did.

You don’t have to go to DARE  headquarters at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, to hear these recordings, and you don’t have to pay for them either. Just follow the link to the university’s Digital Collection Center, and see for yourself.

If they made these recordings half a century ago, why has it taken so long to make them available? In a word, privacy. The interviewees were promised anonymity. In the last four years, having completed production of the print volumes, DARE enlisted student interns and volunteers to bleep out names in the recordings and thus finally make them freely available.

Now, however, they are all accessible, right at your fingertips. if you want to hear how someone sounded back in the 1960s in Aaronsburg, Pa.; Adams, Ky.; Beardstown, Ill., or a thousand other places, the index to this collection will quickly find an example for you. And among other things, the index will tell you what they talked about. In the case of Adams, Ky., for example, they discussed family history, logging, work animals, wild greens, home remedies, sorghum molasses, and curing pork.

So why wait? Give it a try yourself, right now. Whether you’re a linguist looking to chart dialect distinctions, an actor looking to put on an authentic local dialect, or just a traveler wanting to hear the sounds of home — it’s all here, much more than I have room to mention.

And if you wish, tell us: What did you find?

DARE’s map represents population density when the words were collected, instead of land area.

Without an accident (as they used to say in the South), it’s time again to harvest a quarterly crop of regional words for the online Dictionary of American Regional English. As usual, the new update is available free on DARE’s website, though a subscription fee is required to get the whole six-volume 60,000-word dictionary online.

The dictionary was compiled in 1965-70 by researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who went out into the field in “word wagons” — campers equipped with tape recorders — to record how Americans talk. In the digital update, also as usual, there are about 40 new or revised entries, without an accident being among the most notable and useful. George Goebel, DARE’s editor, defines the phrase as “probably, very likely,” that is, “if nothing unexpected happens, barring an accident.”

So back in 1925, as the new entry in DARE gives evidence, we could have said, “Without an accident it will rain tonight,” or “If you go down to the log camps, without an accident you will see him.”

Most of the new or revised entries are for the first two letters of the alphabet, since Volume I, covering A-B-C, was published in 1985, before the internet was widely available, or for that matter, before there was much of anything on what we now call the internet. Other published and unpublished sources have also been made available since 1985.

So in this update we find ackempucky (“vigor, spunk”) from Iowa in 1949 with reference to a law: “It had more on the ball, more genuine ackempucky (a word that originated in your southern Ohio) than any other enactment congress ever accomplished.”

There’s also afterclap, with an added New England meaning of “dessert,” and buggy, a widespread current term (South, South Midland, Ohio, Pennsylvania) for what the rest of us call a shopping cart.

Finaciously, there’s a word in eastern Kentucky that means “finally, completely,” as in “Joe took it into his head he’d play one on my old man at’d stop his hunting and trapping and fishing afinaciously and forever more” (1978) and “I know jest the kind you’d want, and I warn you right now hit’ll be your finacious ruination!” (1925).

Frederic Cassidy (right), first editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, with students who helped compile it by recording Americans in the field. (Photo courtesy of U. of Wisconsin-Madison Archives, 1965)

During half a century of painstaking research that gradually brought the Dictionary of American Regional English into being, its staff, friends, and benefactors have found many occasions to celebrate its progress, volume by volume starting in 1985 and ending just a few years ago with the publication of the final Volume 6, accommodating some 60,000 words that are often missing from other dictionaries because they are used only in parts of our vast nation.

Oh, and then it has gone online.

What a difference DARE  has made in our knowledge of the way Americans talk — and used to talk — in all 50 states! Joan Hall, chief editor for the last three volumes, enumerates: “We’ve produced six print volumes, a digital version, an updated and corrected digital version, and a massive collection of audio recordings that are now publicly available.”

The sad news is that, after many years of generous grants to keep its print and then its online versions going, the eleemosynary support has just about disappeared, and editorial operations will have to cease around the end of 2017. But the good news is, so much remains available for research and the sheer pleasure of enjoying the variety of our language. And so they are holding a party next month in Madison, home of DARE  at the University of Wisconsin.

And you can keep in touch, because the findings of DARE remain readily available to scholars and the public. The six paper volumes are just the beginning. DARE is now available, and readily searchable, in its online version, for just $49 a year to individuals, from its publisher, Harvard University Press.

And oral recordings of the numerous individuals interviewed for DARE — by field workers who traveled all over America in “word wagons” outfitted with tape recorders (see photo above) — remain available at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Libraries Digital Collections Center.

And it’s not necessarily a complete end. Chief Editor George Goebel may find it possible to continue electronic upgrades, at least occasionally. “Our website will stay available,” Hall says, “though updates will be less regular.”

When they show up, you can be sure you’ll learn about them right here.

P.S. If you somehow hadn’t heard about the closing of DARE, Jesse Sheidlower’s recent New Yorker article will give you the (almost) whole story.

St. Mary-le-Bow Church, London

The phone rings during breakfast, and it’s the BBC. They want me on Radio London’s Breakfast Show, hosted by Vanessa Feltz, for a few minutes just after 9 a.m. According to two trashy tabloids (The Sun and the Daily Mail, September 29) BBC TV viewers are complaining about the speech of an announcer, Russell Evans. And it turns out interesting: Feltz is a feisty one, spoiling for a fight.

Russell Evans speaks the ordinary vernacular of the London area rather than the snootier English favored by the ruling class and traditional broadcasters. One viewer grumbled (on the record: The Sun names her as Sarah Morgan): “Listening to the announcer giving lottery results was painful. Firty, free, and fousand aren’t numbers I’ve ever heard of.”

Several key features identify vernacular London English. “L” sounds after vowels turn into a “w” sound (call is pronounced caw-w); initial “h” is dropped; “t” between vowels turns into a glottal stop (forty becomes for’y; “ng” on the end of the word is replaced by “n” (wedding is weddin); and the most stigmatized feature is that the initial dental sound “th” gets replaced by the labiodental “f” so that “thin” sounds the same as “fin.” I was well aware that what Radio London wanted from me was a defense of proletarian speech against an attack by snooty conservatives. I was up for that.

Feltz briefly reviewed the story, then introduced me and asked my opinion. I pointed out that London-area spoken English is like most languages in not having the dental “th” sound, which is very rare globally. You need a sharp ear to even detect the acoustic difference, so misunderstandings are extraordinarily unlikely. Very few pairs of words are distinguished solely by the “th”/“f” contrast: thin/fin,  three/free,  thread/Fred,  thrill/frill, thresh/fresh… and there aren’t a whole lot more.

So saying that you don’t want people on TV using the well-established “f”-for-“th” substitution has the same status as saying you don’t want to hear Manchester or Scots accents on the BBC: It’s just raw social prejudice.

And then Feltz came barreling out of her corner at me. “Wait a minute, professor” she said, “I think you’re being disingenuous.”

I reeled. When you get called professor on a radio show or in a courtroom, you’re already in trouble. My name is Geoff.

“You’re up there in Edinburgh, right?” (That, I had to admit, is where I currently live. But I knew she was playing the ethnicity card, implying that from faraway Scotland I was unqualified to comment — though in truth I grew up in the London area and speak its dialect quasi-natively.)

“Well, I was born within the sound of Bow Bells,” Feltz went on triumphantly. (Being born where you can hear the famous bells of St. Mary-le-Bow church is traditionally taken to define being a Cockney, the quintessentially authentic Londoner.) “So I’m a real Cockney, and I say for’y for forty, but I don’t say free fousand, I say three thousand, and I think saying free fousand is lazy speech and it’s wrong!”

I was on the ropes already. How does an ethnically discredited professor from the wrong end of the country rebut a native speaker who firmly asserts the incorrectness of something in her own native dialect? Contradict a native speaker?

Feltz dismissed my argument about lack of ambiguity by drawing a perfectly valid distinction: People weren’t claiming it was impossible to understand, she said, they were saying it was lazy and bad. And she crushed my typological argument about global rarity by simply saying: “We don’t care about that.” (A sound response to a rather weak point, I must admit.)

I fought back desperately: “You call me disingenuous. I’ll tell you who’s being disingenuous: the woman who claims listening to Russell Evans saying ‘firty-free’ is ‘painful.’ It’s ordinary, everyday London English, and I don’t think anyone is being truthful if they say it causes them actual pain.”

But this ad hominem point cut no ice with Feltz, and as she talked on, she casually activated the nuclear option, against which no talk-show guest can win. Confidently explaining more to her listeners about why she was right and the professor was wrong, she quietly pulled the plug, and the phone line from my breakfast table was no longer on the air. There was just a producer’s voice in my ear saying thanks, that was just great, bye-bye!

I lost this one, big-league. I got whupped!

Columbus monument in Barcelona, with helicopter bearing symbol of Catalonia (Photo by Carles Ribas, El País)

The violence surrounding the Catalan independence referendum on October 1 has put Spanish democracy under a microscope. Some scholars believe Monday’s holiday, which the United States calls Columbus Day and some localities celebrate as Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead, has an implicit link to the Catalan independence struggle, one that casts some doubt on the national origins of Christopher Columbus.

While conventionally regarded as Genovese, his language had resonances of Catalan.

Columbus signed documents (and was referred to in state records) as “Colom” — a Catalan last name meaning “dove.” There is no record of him writing in the Genoese dialect or Italian, even in letters sent to Genoa. Save one letter in Catalan, his epistles are in Latin or Spanish, some have marginal notes in Hebrew. The conquest chronicler Bartolomé de las Casas noted that Colom “doesn’t grasp the entirety of the words in Castilian” — and much of his Spanish was colored by false cognates, idiomatic interference, and crosslingual appropriations from Catalan:

Lluís de Yzaguirre, a professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics at Pompeu Fabra University, in Barcelona, studied Colom’s Spanish with a forensic linguistics algorithm that applies lexical mistakes to decipher the native language of the writer. He found Colom’s hypercorrections of “b” and “v,” as well as “o” and “u” in Spanish were typical of a Catalan speaker.

Colom’s library had books in Catalan, and he named the island of Montserrat for a monastery near Barcelona.

He was also surrounded by Catalonians. Lluís de Santàngel, who financed him, was from Valencia (part of the Països Catalans) and spoke Catalan, and Pedro de Terreros, Colom’s personal steward — the only crewmember with him on all four voyages — was from north of Barcelona; the first baptism in the Americas was carried out by Ramon Pané, a man “of the Catalan nation,” according to Las Casas, most likely chosen by Colom, as was the first apostolic vicar of the West Indies (Bernat de Boïl) and the expedition’s military chief (Bertran i de Margarit).

The Catholic Monarchs received Colom in Barcelona after the first voyage, and some scholars maintain that the first journey left not from Palos, in Andalucía, but from Pals in Catalonia.

Colom’s son Diego left a silver lamp in his will to Our Lady of Montserrat “on account of the great devotion that I have always had.” As Diego never lived in Catalonia, and his mother was Portuguese, a piety for Montserrat was probably inherited from his father. According to the archives of his son Fernando, the only letter Colom bequeathed to him was written in Catalan; that document and a copy (translated to German from Catalan in Strasbourg in 1497) were lost; many believe they were destroyed in part to subdue Catalonian nationalism.

Part of the mystery may have come from Colom himself. The Hebrew marginalia and references to the Jewish High Holy Days in his writings indicate that, like Lluís de Santàngel, it is possible Colom or his ancestors were converts to Christianity.

At the end of La Rambla, Barcelona’s most famous street, is a 200-foot high statue of Colom. At the base are Lluís de Santàngel, the financier; Jaume Ferrer de Blanes, a cartographer; Bernat de Boïl, that first apostolic minister in the Americas; and Pere Bertran i de Margarit, the military commander. The motto of the monument is, “Honorable Colom, Catalonia honors her favorite children.”

Colom is pointing out to sea, with his back to Castile.

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is an associate professor in the department of humanities at the University of Puerto Rico. His books include After American Studies (Routledge, 2017), Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism, and Paris in American Literatures. His recent work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Voces del Caribe, and The Minnesota Review.

If you might could be wondering a little about the kind of English spoken in the Appalachians — the kind that includes double modals like “might could” and asks, “Was you wantin’ to go to town?” Well, there’s a new website, written by the leading experts on that very topic, that tells the truth, the whole truth, about it. It’s free, available to everyone, and it’s right here.

Instead of waiting here for my further explanation, you can go right now to the website and enjoy its many features, including a vocabulary quiz. But in case you’d like a preview:

The principal author of the website is Michael Montgomery of the University of South Carolina, assisted by Paul Reed of the University of Alabama. Montgomery is the leading expert on Appalachian English, having devoted a lifetime to it. And a lifetime’s collection of materials is right there on the site.

Montgomery begins at the beginning, explaining that Appalachian English is “found in a large mountain and valley region encompassing all or parts of … West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, western Virginia and North Carolina, northern Georgia and Alabama, and northwestern South Carolina.” And he instructs us that natives of the region call it “AppalATCHa,” never “Ap-pa-LAY-cha.”

The website contains numerous articles, some of general interest and some for experts. There are also countless examples of Appalachian English sentences, such as these:

It just took somebody all the time a-working, a-keeping that, because it was a-boiling.
I might can go with you tomorrow.
It was a-fixin’ to come a storm.
I’ve not never heard of that.

These examples don’t begin to do justice to the organization, richness, depth, and even beauty of the website. I’m too impatient to wait — I want to go back to it right now. See you in Appalachia!

Sen. Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee

One day not long ago this emerged from the famously short fingers of the 45th president:

 
Let’s do a close reading, shall we, starting with a fact-check. Is The New York Times failing (or Failing, as Trump designates it with his eccentric capitalization rules)? No. In its most recent quarterly report, the paper recorded an addition of 93,000 digital subscriptions, for a total of 2.3 million. Over all, operating profit for the quarter was $28 million, up from $9 million last year.

Is Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee little? (More on Trump’s rendition of this word in a minute.) Leaving aside the schoolyard-bully spectacle of it, this claim checks out, technically. The GOP senator is 5 feet 7 inches tall, while the average non-Hispanic white American male age 60 or older is 5 feet 9 inches.

Moving to the meat of the tweet, it concerns a Times interview with Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he asserted that Trump treats his office like “a reality show,” that his reckless threats to other countries may have set us “on the path to World War III,” and that “the vast majority” of Republican senators understood “the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”

Trump’s claim that the Times somehow fooled Corker or taped its conversation with him without his knowledge is categorically false. After the tweet, the Times reporter Jonathan Martin posted an audio snippet of Corker saying to aides, who were listening in on the call, “I know they’re recording it, and I hope you are, too.”  One of the aides indeed taped the interview as well.

It’s hard to decide whether to call Trump’s claim on this a lie. He presumably didn’t know that Corker knew he was being recorded, but, rather, just threw out the claim that it was done behind the senator’s back, with a reckless disregard for the truth. Personally, I would call that a lie.

Moving on to stylistic matters, it almost goes without saying that the tweet includes (concludes with, in fact) one of Trump’s trademark superfluous exclamation points, and contains two of his trademark Homeric epithets – Failing and Liddle’. The rendition of that last word is the most striking thing about the tweet. The first question is, why did Trump misspell it? The possibilities that initially occur to me are, one, that he was trying to reproduce characteristic North American flapping of the /t/ sound in little (very unlikely) and, two, that he doesn’t know how to spell the word (pretty unlikely). I am left to surmise that Trump used the ds in an attempt to further diminutize the nickname, by simulating the way a toddler might say it. Thus, if he had taken it one more step, he would have made it “Widdle Bob Corker.”

That leaves the mystifying matter of the apostrophe at the end. Possible explanations, in ascending order of probability, are:

• Trump used it to indicate an acute accent, as is done in popular African-American names like Andre’ and DeAndre’.
• Trump’s short fingers typed the apostrophe by mistake, and he didn’t bother to proofread.
• Trump intended to put “Liddle” in quotation marks — his second favorite punctuational move, after the exclamation points — and forgot or neglected to put in the first quote mark.

There’s one more notable thing about the tweet: the line “was made to sound a fool.” It struck me that the standard American version of this would be “was made to sound like a fool,” while the “like” might be left out, as Trump did, in British English. To find out if I was right, I consulted my go-to source on such matters, the American-born Sussex University linguistics professor Lynne Murphy.

She confirmed my sense and pointed me to a blog post she wrote on the subject in 2009, in which she quoted John Algeo’s book British or American English?

“A group of copular verbs (…) have predominantly adjectival complements in common-core English, but also have nominal subject complements in British more frequently than in American.” In other words, in AmE or BrE, you could say I feel old (because my students told me yesterday that Brad Pitt is ‘a sexy old man’). You could also say I feel like an unsexy geriatric case, because the like phrase in that case plays an adjectival role in the sentence. But in BrE, you can also forgo the like and just go straight to the nouny part of the description. …

Here are some examples showing more of this pattern:

sound: He sounded a complete mess. [Jeremy Clarke in The Independent]

look: Joey Barton has made me look a fool. [Oliver Holt on Mirror.co.uk]

Was Trump trying to sound an Englishman? Or did he inherit the construction from his Scottish-born mother? I doubt it. Possibly he was echoing a common expression found in Twelfth Night (“This fellow is wise enough to play the fool”) and in the classic 1972 soul song “Everybody Plays the Fool.” It was also suggested when I raised the question on Twitter that the “like”-less construction is common in African-American English and/or in the rural South.

But I think I have a more likely explanation. Using “like” would have put Trump’s tweet at 142 characters. So he ditched it.

It is a truism universally acknowledged (by Britons) that Americanisms are taking over British English. This supposed subjugation, which has been lamented for a couple of centuries, is the subject of a new book by Matthew Engel, That’s the Way It Crumbles: The American Conquest of English. In it he argues that so many Americanisms have taken hold in Britain — including “cookie” instead of the traditional “biscuit” — that within a century, quite possibly, American English will “absorb the British version completely.”

When he was researching the book, Engel decided to interview me, on account of my blog, Not One-Off Britishisms. He views it as contrarian, because it’s about words and expressions that have flowed the other way, from Britain to America. In the book, he described me as “an affable and hospitable man” but dismissed the blog as more or less inconsequential, with the subjects of many entries  either “passing fads” or “so well camouflaged that their ancestry is largely forgotten.” (The latter would seem proof of the influence of British English in the U.S., but never mind.)

“When comparing the indignities with those heaped on British English,” Engel writes of me, “he can sound a bit like a White House spokesman threatening nuclear retaliation for an outrageous and provocative attack launched by the armed forces of Rutland.” (Rutland being a county in England.)

No comment on that analogy. I’ll just move on to observe that the reality is rather more complicated than Engel’s jeremiad suggests. As The Economist observed:

It is true that America is influencing British usage. “Smart” is increasingly describing the intelligent as much as the well dressed. (Never mind that “smart” first was used this way in Britain in 1571.) Many Britons prefer “movies” to “films”. And “fries” and “cookies” are now appearing alongside “chips” and “biscuits”. But are they always replacing them?

No: “smart” is savvy, whereas “clever” is swotty. “Fries” are thin and crispy, and “cookies” are American styles like chocolate-chip, notes Lynne Murphy, an American linguist at Sussex University writing her own book about the relationship between British and American English. “Movies” tend to come from Hollywood; “film” is still preferred for the latest gritty cinema from Europe. In other words, these Americanisms are not an impoverishment of British English. They are additions to it.

I’ll add that when I was in London recently, I found that a common menu item was “skinny fries,” emphasizing the distinction from the fatter, still thriving chips, as in fish and.

A new academic study that crunched 30 million tweets and 15 million digitized books published between 1800 and 2010 found that, in the worldwide use of English, spelling and vocabulary are indeed trending toward American versions. However, the trend is most pronounced in countries where English isn’t the primary language, and, in all the world, is seen least in Britain.

That’s consistent with what I found in a book I just finished reading, Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head Is Really Up To, by Dean Burnett, published in London in 2016. Burnett, a neuroscientist at Cardiff University, in Wales, is a sort of poster boy for the survival of British English. On page 1 alone, he does these distinctively British things:

• Spells the words “apologise” (American: “apologize”) and “behaviours” (“behavior”).
• Refers to a little boy “dribbling” (the more common American word word is “drooling”).
• Uses logical punctuation and single quotation marks (the American practice is double quotes) when he refers to ‘something people say’.

Page 1 is not an aberration. From beginning to end, the book is packed with Britishisms. Most apparent are the different spellings, including “sceptical” (U.S.: “skeptical”), “aeons” (“eons”), “”travelling” (“traveling”), “tyre,” “pyjamas,” “foetal” (“fetal”), “centre” (“center”) and “hippy” (“hippie,” as in the flower child of yore, not an adjective meaning wide around the middle). If you’re skeptical or sceptical on the British-American difference, see this Google Ngram chart). Burnett probably somewhere wrote “programme,” but I didn’t catch it.

As far as vocabulary goes, in this 302-page book, I counted 43 distinctively British terms, including “dribbling.” Here are the others, in order, with American equivalents in parenthesis. For ease of reading, I’ve dispensed with quotation marks except where Burnett uses them. And the links are to Not One-Off Britishisms posts, indicating that term has had at least some penetration in the U.S.

Without any bother (without any trouble), petrol (gas), worrying (troubling), mum (mom), crisps (chips or potato chips), she used to live in the street next to us (on the street), well done (good job), “Not now, mate” (buddy), here’s the clever bit (smart part), massive (not exclusively British but used massively more often there than here), turning up drunk (showing up), at university (in college), row (argument), chap (guy), knock-on consequences (no real equivalent, hereafter abbreviated NRE), queue (line), maths (math), have a look (take a look), “you were crap” (NRE), boffin (NRE), sport (sports), daft (crazy), games consoles (game), trainers (sneakers), estate agent (real-estate agent), check your emails (email), goal-orientated (oriented), different to (from), a bit of fun (some fun), cut you up (cut you off, in the motoring sense), down to you (up to you), waiting staff (wait staff), I went to the shops (I went shopping), shop (store), forecourts (NRE), noughts and crosses (tic tac toe), heard it from some bloke down the pub (heard it from some guy at the bar), carry on (continue, go on), messes about (messes around).

And how often does Burnett use American lingo? I’m at a bit of a disadvantage here, since presumably I wouldn’t necessarily recognize an Americanism as such; it might just seem normal to me. So bear that in mind when I say I counted only four terms that appear to be Yank imports: up for grabs, fans (in a sports context — the more common British word is “supporters”), smart (Burnett alternates it with “clever”), and the cowboy-movie pronto.

And that’s the way the biscuit crumbles.

“Imagine if I hadn’t of been there!” said someone in an email to my brother, Richard. He regarded the sentence coldly, as if it were a slimy creature emerging from under a rock. What’s that of ? A misspelled extra have ? Why? Doesn’t had suffice? He turned to the grammarian in the family, and asked me what had gone wrong.

It’s an interesting puzzle that teaches us something about drawing the subtle distinction between intralinguistic slips and interlinguistic variation.

Let’s start by setting aside the spelling error. It’s quite common, and not irrational (in piece of cake the spelling of stands for exactly the same sound as a reduced have with its “h” dropped). The standard spelling for reduced have is ’ve, as in I should’ve known (or -a in some representations of colloquial speech: I shoulda known).

We can also ignore the ungainliness of hadn’t’ve. The puzzle holds for had, as in [1] — which I prefix with ‘^%‘ to mark it as grammatical for some speakers of standard English but not others.

[1]   ^%Imagine if I had’ve been there.

The puzzle is, why the extra ’ve? I would have written [1] as [2] (which I think everyone accepts, hence no percent sign).

[2]   Imagine if I had been there.

You may feel like saying that the people who write [1] are just wrong. But we need a reason why it isn’t me that’s wrong, for inexplicably leaving out a have that at least some people feel is needed.

The extra-have people have been around for a long time, possibly since the 15th century (see this paper [open access]). Though Henry Fowler (1926) called the construction “no better than an illiterate blunder, and easily shown to be absurd,” the similarly prescriptive Eric Partridge in 1942 called it “an error by no means confined to the illiterate.” I think they’re both wrong; error, in the sense of making a slip, is the wrong way to look at it.

The main problem with calling it a “blunder” is that it doesn’t explain the data. Those who use [1] aren’t random blunderers. They don’t insert arbitrary extra syllables in miscellaneous places. It’s just one extra have (usually reduced), and in only one kind of context.

What context? Not ordinary declarative main clauses: Even speakers who accept [1] don’t write things like [3] (which I prefix with an asterisk to mark it as flatly ungrammatical).

[3]   *Previously we had’ve always locked the car.

Instead, had’ve only occurs in what I’ll call irrealis clauses: counterfactuals with if, or after verbs like wish or imagine:

[4]   ^%If only we had’ve locked the car.

[5]   ^%I wish we had’ve locked the car.

That separates had’ve from sequences like could’ve or will’ve, where a reduced have occurs after a modal auxiliary verb. That is found in plain positive declarative main clauses: He could’ve been killed; By now she will’ve told him. And it’s just the ordinary perfect tense have, as in He has been killed; She has told him.

The had that gets the extra have, by contrast, is limited to irrealis contexts. And it’s a special had: It has the past tense shape, but doesn’t refer to past time. In if I had a hammer, the time of me having a hammer is not in the past; it’s in a hypothetical state of the world that doesn’t exist yet. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls this use of a past tense form the remote preterite. (By the way, only auxiliary had gets the extra have, not the main verb signaling possession: Nobody says *if I had’ve a hammer!)

Two key features are found only in irrealis clauses: the peculiar first- or third-person irrealis form of be, as in if I were a carpenter; and the remote preterite, as in if I went home.

So I think the solution to the puzzle is this: People who accept [1] have subconsciously formed the view that the correct form for the auxiliary verb have in irrealis contexts is (or can be) had’ve (or had have ), not just had. They’re not blundering. They’re following the rules of their variety of standard English. And it differs from mine (and perhaps yours, too) only trivially: For me the right form of auxiliary have in irrealis clauses is had; for them it’s had’ve.

Please don’t ask me why they tacitly formed their view; that’s a whole different layer of mysteriousness. I’m not trying to explain the historical evolution or the acquisition at this point. My goal is nothing more than a description in terms that relate the phenomenon sensibly to what we already know. Richard deserves at least that much when he consults his grammarian brother.

When I last addressed the word even, in 2013, it had already migrated from its accustomed function as an adverb in such sentences as “I can’t even move this suitcase, much less pick it up” or “Even vegetarians sometimes have a hankering for bacon.” The Oxford English Dictionary elegantly gives this traditional meaning as:

Intimating that the sentence expresses an extreme case of a more general proposition implied (=French même). Prefixed … to the particular word, phrase, or clause, on which the extreme character of the statement or supposition depends.

By the time of my post, the word had for some time established itself — in expressions like “What does that even mean?” “I don’t even know you,” and “Is that even a thing?” — as, in Mark Liberman’s formulation, a “purely emphatic” intensifier. I noted that it had migrated “to an unexpected part of the sentence, so that is ostentatiously not ‘prefixed … to the particular word, phrase, or clause’ it has to do with.”

Four and half years on, there are some new things to say. Well, one is an old thing — in the original post, I somehow neglected the expression, “I can’t even,” which had gotten its first Urban Dictionary definition in 2010 (sic throughout):

Yes thoes three words are a sentence a full sentence, well only on tumblr. is often used when something is either too funny, scary, cute, to have a good reaction too.

girl: “it was so awkward”
girl2: “OMFG AHAHAHA I CAN’T EVEN”

Its popularity peaked in late 2013, some months after my post (which is my unconvincing excuse for whiffing on it). In October of that year, according to the Know Your Meme website,

the Tumblr blog TheBunionPaper published a satirical news article titled “Rich Girl in Dining Hall Can’t Even,” accumulating upwards of 1,900 notes in seven months. On November 20th, the feminist culture blog The Toast published an article about Internet linguistics, which described the meaning of the expression “I have lost all ability to can.” On January 26th, 2014, country music singer Kacey Musgraves repeated the phrase “I can’t even” during her acceptance speech for Best Country Album at the 2014 Grammy Awards.

Not surprisingly, Liberman and his Language Log colleagues have been all over “I can’t even.”

Know Your Meme credibly traces the expression to the earlier-emerging, “I don’t even,” which it cites first in a 2007 message board. However, three years before that, Regina used it in the movie Mean Girls: “She’s so pathetic. Let me tell you something about Janis Ian. We were best friends in middle school. I know, right? It’s so embarrassing. I don’t even … Whatever.”

Tina Fey’s Mean Girls is linguistically astonishingly fruitful; my sense is that it reflected and created, in equal measure, loads of new ways of talking. The screenplay is a veritable symphony merely in its uses of the modern-day even, including “What does that even mean?” and these exchanges:

• Crying Girl: “I wish we could all get along like we used to in middle school … I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy …” [about to cry]  Damian: [shouting from back] “She doesn’t even go here!” Ms. Norbury: “Do you even go to this school?” Crying Girl: “No … I just have a lot of feelings …”
• Regina: “Cady, do you even know who sings this?” Cady: “Um … the Spice Girls?”
• Gretchen: [to Cady] “Two years ago she told me hoops earrings were her thing and I wasn’t allowed to wear them anymore. And then for Hanukkah my parents got this pair of really expensive white gold hoops and I had to pretend like I didn’t even like them and … it was so sad.”
• Cady: “What do we even talk about?” Janis: [shrugs shoulders] “Hair products!”

The latest even development takes it a step beyond I can’t even. In that construction, a following verb is implied and elided: “I can’t even [begin to express how funny/scary/cute/whatever the thing I'm reacting to is].” But now that’s thrown aside and even is a pure signifier of emphasis, improbability, and disbelief. I first encountered from Jon Danziger (@jondanziger)  who tweeted on November 17, apropos of a confounding news item, “What is this even?” I asked him about it and he reported it is a favorite of his students at Pace University.

I can’t precisely determine when “What is this even” emerged. The Washington Post journalist Aaron Blake used it on Twitter in May of this year:

Searching on Twitter as I write this, I find an abundance of hits, most without Blake’s comma and question mark:

What’s next for even? Sorry — even I can’t.

Two weeks from now, hundreds of linguists will convene in Salt Lake City for the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and affiliated groups like the American Dialect Society, the American Name Society, and others. It’s the big meeting of the year for experts in the study of language, including the next generation of would-be experts, who are now graduate students imbibing (or challenging) the wisdom of their elders.

If you’re a linguist, you don’t want to miss this opportunity to exchange the latest ideas (and incidentally vote for the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year). And if you’re such an expert, you don’t want to be ignorant of the local lingo.

Fortunately, there’s a way to develop expertise in the distinctive language of Utah. It’s the recently completed six-volume 60,000-word Dictionary of American Regional English, sponsored by that American Dialect Society. And here, derived from that dictionary, is a complete set of lessons designed to transform you linguistically into a Utahn.

They won’t take long to learn, either, because there are only about a dozen words or phrases in DARE that are distinctive to Utah alone. That’s because in the United States, regional and local language boundaries, especially in the West, don’t follow state boundaries. But a few do, and here they are, courtesy of DARE.

• Lesson 1: Slickrock. This is the name used in Utah for a rock that is slick. DARE defines it as “an expanse of naturally smoothed, polished rock.”
• Lesson 2: Culinary water. water you can drink, as opposed to irrigation water.
• Lesson 3, Plants. Oose: another name for the yucca. Snowdrop: plant commonly known as fritillary. Mormon tree: more commonly known as poplar. Utah bugler: carmine-colored flowers. Utah oak: gambel oak.
• Lesson 4, Fish. Mountain herring: outside Utah, known as the whitefish.
  Leatherside minnow or Utah chub: elsewhere known simply as chub.
• Lesson 5, Mormons. Saint: an old-fashioned term for a Mormon. Gentile: a non-Mormon. Cohab: “one who lives in illegal cohabitation, specifically a polygamous Mormon.” Gold-and-green ball: a dance held for young people to honor them for service to the church.
• Lesson 6, Things to do. Slough: to play hooky, skip school. Across lots: go straight to hell.

Those are all from the print version of DARE, and all kidding aside, that’s what DARE says they mean. For those who subscribe to the online version (at $50 a year) of DARE, more Utah wonders await. In particular, there’s the Utah mile, defined as an indeterminate distance, the opposite of a straight line.

So practice this dialogue and you’ll get the hang of it:

“Hey, Chub, got any oose juice today? Or maybe culinary water? Come and sit on this slickrock and share it. I caught a big mountain herring this morning. I’m going to the gold-and-green ball tonight with one of my cohabs. Oh, you want to slough? Well, you can just go across lots.”

Gosh, you sound just like you’re from Utah.

A nominee for most creative word of 2017 was “milkshake duck”: a subject beloved — often on social media — and then exposed for unsavory behavior.

Some of you on the East Coast may already be ready to declare bomb cyclone the word of the year for 2018, but first we must take stock of the words of 2017. This year’s meeting of the American Dialect Society took place in Salt Lake City. The bomb cyclone kept a good number of our East Coast colleagues at  home, but we persevered, with Grant Barrett and Jane Solomon stepping in for Ben Zimmer to run the Word of the Year meeting on Friday night. At the meeting I first encountered milkshake duck — one of those wonderful terms that gives you a way to talk about something you now realize you really wanted a term for. Wondering what I’m talking about? Read on!

As I have done for the past couple of years, I’m providing the results on the winners in multiple categories as well as highlights from our discussions of various words; the final vote counts are available on the ADS website.

Word of the Year for 2017: fake news (“disinformation or falsehoods presented as real news; actual news that is claimed to be untrue”). Anticipating complaints about our picking two words as the “word” of the year, let me start by saying that compound words count as words for our purposes. And certainly fake news has been all over, well, the news. I also know that some folks may be concerned about giving publicity to a word that represents such a troubling and dangerous phenomenon. But at the meeting, the journalist Lane Greene (the “Johnson” columnist in The Economist) made a compelling case that we all have to be paying attention to how this compound is being used. He noted that dictators around the world are following Donald Trump’s lead in using fake news (or its equivalent) to suppress journalists/journalism. The press release from the American Dialect Society quotes Ben Zimmer, chair of the society’s New Words Committee and language columnist for The Wall Street Journal: “When President Trump latched on to fake news early in 2017, he often used it as a rhetorical bludgeon to disparage any news report that he happened to disagree with. That obscured the earlier use of fake news for misinformation or disinformation spread online, as was seen on social media during the 2016 presidential campaign.” Fake news (which also won the category Most Likely to Succeed) beat out multiple other contenders, including persister (or perSISTER, a blend of persist and sister; see below) and several of the category winners.

Political Word of the Year: take a knee (“kneel in protest against injustice and inequality, especially during a time when others are standing”). There were three strong contenders in this category: take a knee, persister/persisterhood, and antifa (‘anti-fascist movements and organizations, treated as a whole’). Persister, as you may recall, took hold in response to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s persisting after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to make her stop speaking during the debate on Jeff Sessions’s confirmation. Senator McConnell said, “Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” Supporters of persister noted that this is a time when women are having to stand up for themselves and persist in multiple arenas — and it is a clever blend, with echoes of protester, too. Supporters of antifa made the good point that antifa has already undergone a striking semantic shift such that it has become an epithet used by the right, despite the fact that really all of us should be antifascist. All good arguments, but take a knee won by a landslide given the prominence of the debate about taking a knee (especially in the NFL) in 2017, its importance as a term of resistance, and its highlighting of the courage to protest.

Most Creative: broflake (‘a male who lacks resilience or coping skills in the face of disagreements or setbacks’). I agree that broflake is a nice blend (of bro and snowflake), which transparently picks up on the new, more negative meanings of snowflake. But there was another excellent candidate that got short shrift: milkshake duck (“person or character that is deeply loved until problematic behavior is revealed or unearthed”). Milkshake duck was coined in a 2016 tweet by Ben Ward, an Australian cartoonist, and then popularized in 2017 by another Twitter user, who listed Ward’s tweet as one of the 15 Twitter jokes to know: “The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist.” It started out referring to, typically, not-famous people who suddenly become famous and loved — often by going viral on social media — and then are relatively quickly exposed for unsavory beliefs, actions, etc. But it seems, at least for some, to have expanded its reach to any beloved famous person who is exposed in this way (e.g., Louis C.K. is a milkshake duck).

Emoji of the Year:  hijab-wearing woman. This emoji was just added in 2017, and what an important addition — with a great story behind it. The addition was inspired at least in part by a 15-year old Saudi girl, Rayouf Alhumedhi, who was living with her family in Berlin in 2016. She was creating a group chat on WhatsApp with friends and realized that she was missing an emoji she could use for herself. She sent a proposal for the hijab-wearing emoji to Unicode, where it received strong support, and she got to participate in the design of the emoji.

Digital Word of the Year: shitpost (noun and verb, “post meaningless social media for the lulz [laughs] or the meme attention”). I thought something related to bitcoins/cryptocurrency would win this category for 2017, and there were two relevant nominees: blockchain (“technology underlying cryptocurrencies like bitcoin”) and initial coin offering (“capital-raising process to collect funds to start up a new cryptocurrency”). But there were multiple nominees from the floor in this category, and from the moment shitpost was nominated, you could feel the support for it in the room. University of Michigan undergraduates taught me this word this past fall as a new slang term; it is a common way to critique people posting unfunny or annoying memes, videos, etc. Two other strong nominees in this category: digital blackface (“when a (usu. white) person uses images of black people as a proxy for themselves on social media”), and ratio (which the Know Your Meme website defines as “an unofficial Twitter law which states that if the amount of replies to a tweet greatly outnumbers the amount of retweets and likes, then the tweet is bad” — and which now apparently can also be a verb, as in “Your tweet was ratioed”).

Slang Word of the Year: wypipo (“phonetic dialect spelling of ‘white people’ used to flag white privilege or absurdity”). Nominated by undergraduates at the University of Tennessee, wypipo is not brand-new but was prominent in 2017. (As we discussed with the word woke last year, the dialect society can also fall into the trap of thinking that words are “new” because more white people have started hearing them.) One argument for wypipo was that it usefully captures the idea that it is no longer OK for white people to deny white privilege. Shooketh (“mock-archaic way of expressing shock or excitement”) appeared in this category, as did snatched (“good-looking, attractive”), popularized by RuPaul, among others.

Most Useful: die by suicide (“a variant of ‘to commit suicide’ that does not suggest a criminal act”). You need an important piece of information here to understand why this phrase won. Among the changes announced by the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook in March 2017 was the shift away from using commit suicide (unless it is in quoted material) and the recommendation to use instead kill oneself, take one’s own life, or die by suicide. The change is motivated by a desire to move away from the verb commit’s connotation of an illegal act. The AP is not alone in this recommendation, and when style guides change something like this, there is a better chance it might stick. This phrase beat out, among others, angry react and sad react, which I posted about this fall after I learned about the terms from students.

Hashtag of the Year: #MeToo (“indication by women that they have experienced sexual harassment or assault”). As has been true for the past couple of years, there were several worthy contenders in this category, including #NeverthelessShePersisted (see above), #Resist (“slogan of the (anti-Trump) resistance”), #TakeAKnee (see above), and #ReclaimingMyTime (“Maxine Waters-inspired message of owning the narrative”). Despite the genuine worthiness of all of those candidates, the momentum of the #MeToo hashtag over the past few months swept this hashtag to a clear victory.

Euphemism of the Year: alternative facts (“contrary information that matches one’s preferred narrative or interpretation of events”). It’s already been almost a year since Kellyanne Conway introduced the phrase alternative facts to describe false information in a Meet the Press interview. There was a worthy last-minute nominee from the floor — internet freedom (“the end of net neutrality”) — but alternative facts was just too strong for the competition.

WTF Word of the Year: covfefe (“a (probably) mistyped word of unknown meaning used in a Donald Trump tweet”). It had to win. The widespread response to covfefe when it appeared, and then disappeared, at the end of May 2017 was, as you may recall, “WTF?”

That’s a wrap for 2017.

A friend of mine sent me a question from his nephew’s ninth-grade final English exam at Haishan High School in Banqiao, New Taipei City:

Which is the correct completion: (a) or (b)?
Lydia knows few things,
(a) and so does Peter.
(b) and neither does Peter.

Stare at that for a few moments and decide what your answer would be.

Here’s the puzzle: My friend discovered, by consulting various English speakers, that Americans all choose (a) as correct, while British and Australian speakers choose (b). This rather shocked me. Let me explain why.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) uses certain tests to diagnose polarity — the difference between positive clauses (like He denied it) and negative ones (like He didn’t deny it). Here are two useful reliable tests (CGEL, Chapter 9, §1.1; prefixed asterisks mark ungrammatical examples):

1. The continuation not even is compatible with negative but not positive polarity. Compare He didn’t deny it, not even to journalists (but not *He denied it, not even to journalists). Note also We saw nothing, not even the entrance.
2. Negative clauses take only positive confirmation tags (like is it?), not negative ones (like isn’t it?). Compare He didn’t deny it, did he?  with *He didn’t deny it, didn’t he?. Note also This seems not implausible, doesn’t it?.

Notice that the presence of not  or n’t  won’t work as a test: That seems not implausible  is positive (hence we get That seems not implausible, doesn’t it?).

The contrast between neither  and so  continuations does yield a test: Compare He didn’t deny it; neither did she  with *He didn’t deny it; so did she.

Next I have to note that there are seven words called approximate negators (CGEL, Chapter 9, §3.3). These define negative clauses allowing a few exceptions. For example, rarely  makes the clause They rarely enjoy it  negative (notice it takes do they?, not don’t they? ). The determinative few  is another approximate negator. Few reviewers liked the book  has negative polarity (compare Few reviewers liked the book, did they?  with *Few reviewers liked the book, didn’t they?).

We now face the question of whether few can negate a clause when it occurs in an object noun phrase. If so, then Lydia knows few things is negative, and should take a neither continuation, so the correct exam answer is (b); but if not, the sentence should take a so continuation, and the right answer is (a).

The trouble is that Lydia knows few things  seems (at least to me) only slightly infected with negative polarity, but not completely. It’s on the cusp. I hate to think that a fundamental matter like negative vs. positive polarity might not be clear and sharp; but with approximate negators, that’s the way it seems to be.

Cross-checking with the other two tests does not fully remove the unclarity. Here are the sentences whose grammaticality we need to assess:

Lydia knows few things, doesn’t she? (should be ungrammatical)
Lydia knows few things, not even about her own country. (should be grammatical)

I’m not necessarily the best judge. My first-language acquisition was in England; about 40 percent of my adult life was in America; and I now work in Scotland among many American colleagues. My intuitive judgments on subtle points of transatlantic dialect divergence aren’t worth the paper they’re usually not written on. I’m unsure enough about the two sentences just cited that I would never base an exam question on them. But if forced to make a choice, I think I would lean toward saying that Lydia knows few things has negative polarity.

Haishan High School takes that view (though it generally uses American English teaching materials), and takes neither continuations to be a reliable test for negative polarity. Hence (b) is claimed to be the “right” answer. But my friend’s survey suggests that native speakers of American English will not get a perfect score on Haishan’s ninth-grade English exam.

In general, I don’t like exam questions of this sort as a way of testing non-native speakers. Too subtle, and not effective in diagnosing practical conversational command of English.

But the theoretical puzzle for me as a linguist is this: If my friend is right about the dialect split, how on earth could it be that Americans come to feel Lydia knows few things (and indefinitely many other such clauses) have positive polarity, while British and Australian speakers grow up assuming such clauses are negative? From what feature of ordinary everyday English discourse could they possibly be picking this up?

Sign outside a South Philadelphia restaurant.

The night before my (adoptive) hometown Philadelphia Eagles took on the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LII (which I keep reading as the Trumpian insult “Lil’”), Saturday Night Live aired a brilliant skit imagining Colonials from each region trash-talking each other at the Continental Congress. Local girl Tina Fey led the Fluffyans (the way we say the city’s name) and nailed the weird local vowels, like pronouncing the team as “Iggles,” the place where you hang your hat as something like “hay-ome,” and a generic encouragement as “C’mawn!”  She also laid down a few distinctive Philadelphia terms, like pop-pop (for grandfather), youse (for the second-person plural), and hoagie (for hero/submarine sandwich).

Since moving here in 1982, I’ve noticed a few other Philadelphia words, including wooder ice for what I grew up calling “Italian Ice”; gravy for spaghetti sauce; down the shore (“to the beach”); jimmies, for what the rest of the country (except Boston!) calls the sprinkles you put on ice cream; and the relatively recent and much talked-about all-purpose noun jawn.

But my favorite is a term I didn’t even know was a localism till last week. That’s when I read a remembrance by Stephen Fried of D. Herbert Lipson, the longtime publisher of Philadelphia Magazine, who passed away in December at the age of 88. It began:

I could tell you about my first weeks at the magazine in 1982, when Herb ordered me to get a haircut and then sent his assistant around every day to see if I had. (I hadn’t. Still haven’t.) I could tell you about the time he stormed into and out of my messy office, calling me an “unmade bed” — prompting one of my colleagues to actually buy a dollhouse bed he “unmade” for me. Or when he told the folks in the art department that I was “such a smacked ass.”

I also started working at Philadelphia Magazine in 1982 — it’s what brought me to the city — and I well remember the Lipsonian insults of Fried. I had never heard “smacked-ass” before and immediately adopted it. Well, actually, I use it in only one situation: in reference to photographs of myself. “If possible, try not to make me look like a smacked-ass,” I’ll say. Or, “Don’t use that one. I look like a smacked-ass.”

After reading Steve’s piece, I realized I had never heard anyone else use “smacked ass” since ’82, and, naturally, investigated, first by looking at the Oxford English Dictionary, Dictionary of American Regional English, and the prominent online dictionaries, none of which listed it. The top definition on Urban Dictionary was posted in 2004: “an absolute idiot that walks around as if he’s got no clue in life.” Searching the term on Google Books yielded 256 hits. To the extent I could discern the home of the authors, they were all from Philadelphia, including the memoirist Joe Queenan, the children’s book author Jerry Spinelli, and the crime writer Lisa Scottoline, whose novel Rough Justice has this line: “Then I hold a press conference where I tell the world that the mayor is a smacked ass.” That obviously suggested a Philly provenance. Herb Lipson himself was from Easton, Pa., but started working in Philadelphia in 1953, right after graduating from Lafayette College.

The first Google Books citation was a snippet from a 1977 criminology text, quoting (presumably) a criminal: “I just asked for change for a ten-dollar bill and felt like a real smacked-ass to myself.” The snippet view doesn’t allow me to search for any info on the person being quoted, but one of the co-authors, the late James Inciardi, was a professor at my institution, the University of Delaware, and may have done fieldwork in Philly, less than an hour away.

A Google search for “smacked ass” led me to a bulletin board where someone used it and was asked what it meant. He replied, “Northeastern US slang for ‘complete idiot.’” Someone else responded, “Funny, I’ve never heard of that in my 30 years of existence, all of it in the Northeast.” Then the original poster said, “Philadelphia, actually. Maybe it was just my mother.”

Green’s Dictionary of Slang contains no entry for the term, but it does have “Face like a smacked arse,” defined as “a phrase used to describe someone who looks very depressed.” It appears to be common in Ireland and the North of England. The first cite for it is 2000 but I found a 1986 quotation on Google Books:  “Big red nose, big red face, just like a smacked arse.”—Cedar, by James Murphy. “Face like a smacked arse” has gotten quite popular, with 23 Google Books hits since 2010.

I posed the question on the American Dialect Society e-mail list and got some helpful responses. John Baker dug up a 2005 Philadelphia Inkwire (the way we say Inquirer) article discussing “Phillyspeak”: “Smacked ass. Peculiarly Philadelphian, this refers to a person, generally male, who has done something really dumb or foolish.” And Garson O’Toole found the earliest use I’ve seen, by the Inquirer columnist Tom Fox in 1971: “I had trouble my first year in high school. I was 13 and a real smacked ass. I knew all the answers. I was so smart when I was 13 I flunked everything but gym and expression.”

Anecdotally, I asked around. Everybody from Philadelphia was familiar with the expression; everyone from somewhere else wasn’t (even if they had lived here for decades). So smacked ass appears to be a particularly Philadelphia expression (with an intriguing Irish connection) that emerged no later than 1971. Any pre-dating or insights welcome.

In conclusion, here’s a message from all us Fluffyans to the Iggles, snapped by an Inkwire photographer: