Fieldworkers compiling the “Dictionary of American Regional English” in 1972.
Have you enjoyed the taste of a cabinet this summer? If so, unless you’re a termite, you are probably from Rhode Island or neighboring southeast Massachusetts. The entry for “cabinet” in the Dictionary of American Regional English will tell you: Most of us know it as a milkshake.
That’s what you’ll find when you look in the pages of the print edition, a first resource for any word used only in certain parts of the United States. Years of fieldwork in the 1960s and ’70s, involving researchers taking “word wagons” with recording equipment to interview local residents throughout the country, plus extensive reading of printed sources (and, more recently, internet searches), have resulted in six imposing volumes with 41,564 entries encompassing 59,582 different senses, published from 1985 to 2013.
But why is a drink a cabinet, of all things? “Etymology uncertain,” the print dictionary says.
Fortunately, DARE isn’t committed entirely to paper. When the final volume, with indexes and maps, was sent to the printer, the dictionary went online, like any good 21st-century reference book, with the advantages of searchability and universal access. If your library doesn’t have it, you can subscribe to DARE online for $49 a year, via the publisher, Harvard University Press.
Meanwhile, the online version is updated quarterly at the dictionary’s headquarters, at the University of Wisconsin. In the past, my Lingua Franca posts have offered samples from the first nine quarterly updates. Since then the editor, George Goebel, has produced three more. You can find them all, free of charge, here.
The most recent is the 12th, dated spring 2018. And this one happens to answer the question of where cabinet (the milkshake) comes from.
It’s a shortening of the term “royal cabinet.” And that in turn comes from the brand name Royal Cabinet, used for a number of drinks, such as Royal Cabinet Champagne, widely advertised in the latter 19th century. DARE online says the name was “presumably meant to suggest that they were suitable for a monarch’s private chambers or cupboard.”
Other improvements in the 12th update include revised entries for “ascared” and for “Dutch band,” a variation added to the entries for “bull band,” “kettle band,” and “rattle band,” all names for “a group of people gathered to create a noisy racket, usually as a mock serenade for a recently married couple.”
The 11th, in winter 2018, includes “coveite,” for “one who lives in a remote part of the mountains”; and “cane chewing,” for “a social gathering at which cane is chewed”; and “all anymore,” for “all gone, used up”; and various new and revised entries for animals.
The 10th, in fall 2017, has “Amarugia,” for “a real or imagined area considered to be ‘back of the beyond,’”; and about 20 variations on “mischief night,” usually the night before Halloween, “when children engage in various more or less destructive pranks.”
DARE was supported throughout its formative years by substantial government and private grants, but now it’s almost entirely volunteer. If another grant came along, however, the staff and organization would be available and ready to continue full scale.