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Bowery Dance With Boilo?
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,...
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‘Done and Done’
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...
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You Say EEther, I Say AYEther
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...
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‘Crawdaddy,’‘Boomba,’ and a ‘Bounce-Around’: an Online Update of Regional Words
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...
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Lexicographers Luxuriate in Barbados
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,...
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Good on All of Us
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...
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‘Dictionary of American Regional English’ Speaks!
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...
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Finaciously, More Regional Words for ‘DARE’
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...
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Farewell, ‘Dictionary of American Regional English’ — but Keep in Touch
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...
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On the Ropes at Radio London
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...
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Christopher Columbus’s Catalan-Inflected Language
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...
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Appalachian English
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,...
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One Tweet in the Life of Donald J. Trump
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...
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The Survival of British English
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...
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The Fine Line Between Errors and Dialect Differences
“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...
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What Is This ‘Even’?
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...
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Utah: Talk Like a Native
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...
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Word(s) of the Year 2017
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...
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Negative or Positive? Answer (a) or (b)
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...
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On Trying Not to Be a ‘Smacked-Ass’
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...
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