American Language Supplement 2 (27 page)
Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
Indiana preserves a Southern type of pronunciation with a greater degree of unanimity than either of her neighboring States, Illinois and Ohio. Why? The answer is clear enough when we consider the census figures for 1860, and remember that this was when most of our informants, who average 80 years of age, were born. Indiana in 1860 had only 41,000 citizens who were born in New York and the six New England States, but it had 140,000 born in the four States of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina. On the other hand Illinois had 168,000 born in New York and New England and 144,000 born in the same four Southern States.
This finding was supported by a remarkable study of the dialect of a village in the north central part of the State, published by W. L. McAtee, already cited.
5
McAtee is a biologist, not a philologian, but he is greatly interested in speechways, and his account of the language
of his native village in his boyhood is one of the most searching and valuable reports on an American dialect ever made.
1
It gives not only an extensive vocabulary, but also a conspectus of the local pronunciation and some account of grammatical vagaries. The words listed, though they belong mainly to the common stock of vulgar American, include many that are characteristic of Appalachian and Lowland Southern, and McAtee says that he found high percentages of coincidence on comparing them with word-lists from Virginia and eastern Alabama. But he also reports some curious discrepancies,
e.g.
, the absence of
to carry
in the sense of to transport or escort, and of
to tote, you-all, fightingest, grits
, and
evening
(for
afternoon
). He lists twenty terms that are plainly of Scotch origin, thirteen loans from the French, twelve from the Dutch, eleven from Indian languages, ten from the German, and eight from the Spanish. He goes on:
The rural folk of Grant county had a varied and graphic language. Americans are said to act as if the law of life were ceaseless hurry, yet the folk take time in talking to use many similes when single words would suffice, and employ numerous even more roundabout expressions apparently out of sheer love of the picturesque. The natural man (here reflected) was not content merely to say something was
big;
no, it was
as big as a whale
or
as big as all outdoors
. If you inquired, “How are you?” the answer would be no monosyllable but some such expression as, “Why, jest as fine as frog’s hair,” or “If I felt any better I’d have to see a doctor.” This choice of language resulted from an underlying, imperishable sense of humor that probably was a vital factor in the people’s endurance and overcoming of the hardships of pioneer life.
2
McAtee later published a ten-page supplement, in a very small edition, of local words and phrases of an indecorous character, and prefaced it with a dignified plea for the scientific study of such terms, supporting the position taken by Allen Walker Read in 1934.
3
He said:
There is such a thing as serious, scholarly study of these theoretically forbidden matters. There can be discussion of the supposedly worst words (choose what one may) that will not descend below the level of purposeful and
dignified etymological and ethnological investigation. For such studies raw material in the form of recorded dialects is essential, and the words which some assure us that the public cannot tolerate should be included as an integral part of language. Those who speak of public distaste in this direction are mistaken, for the words involved are of the public. Even the ugliest of the so-called unprintable Anglo-Saxon monosyllables are known to every person in the land.
1
The ethnologists have long ago got rid of the prudery here denounced, but among philologians it is still all too prevalent.
In 1926 Richmond P. Bond published in
American Speech
a long and interesting list of similes embodying comparisons with animal traits, in use in Indiana popular speech,
e.g., as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, as skittish as a colt
and
as tough as a mule
, and to it he added a great many other metaphors of the same origin,
e.g., catnap, pussyfoot, pigheaded, goose egg
(zero),
to ferret out, road-hog, coon’s age, bear-hug
and
snake-fence
.
2
Most of these, of course, are common American, but there are a number that I have not found elsewhere,
e.g., as proud as a dog with two tails, as poor as a racehorse, as safe as a cow in the stockyards, as jealous as a cat, as sour as a billy-goat
(applied to milk),
as greasy as a muskrat, little buzzard
(a dirty child),
as tough as a biled owl
, and
as mean as a jaybird
. By some strange oversight Bond omitted
as durable as a hog’s snout
and
to goose;
it is impossible to believe that they are unknown in Indiana, the native soil of James Whitcomb Riley and George Ade. He listed
as poor as Job’s turkey
, but it is not peculiar to Indiana. The DAE traces it to 1824, when it appeared in the Troy (N. Y.)
Sentinel
in the form of
as patient as Job’s turkey
. But by 1830
poor
was substituted for
patient
, and has prevailed ever since. The simile, says the DAJE, posits “an imaginary turkey having the qualities of patience and poverty, in allusion to the qualities of Job.” But why a turkey? So far as I know, this question has never been answered. Bond listed
as hot as a mink
, an obvious echo of the widespread folk-belief that
Putorius vison
bursts with libido. McAtee notes this belief in the Supplement that I have lately noted, and says that it also prevails among the French-Canadians, whose name for the animal embodies a reference to it.
In 1939 Paul G. Brewster supplemented the Bond list in a paper in
American Speech
on Indiana folk-metaphors in general, and in 1941
and 1942 he followed it with a second, and a third.
1
The materials for all three were gathered in ten counties in the southern part of the State, five of them fronting on the Ohio river. Some specimens:
A skinny person …
has the running-gears of a grasshopper
. People of stocky build are
built like a depot stove
. A red-head may be described by: “If you cut his hair he’d bleed to death.” … A prominent and hooked nasal organ is a
cherry-picker’s nose
, the possessor of which could hook it over a limb and thus support himself while he picked cherries with both hands.… An untrustworthy man is
so crooked he could hide behind a corkscrew
.… One who is not over-intelligent is
as dumb as a mine mule in low coal
, or
doesn’t know sheep pearls
2
from cherry-seed
.… The person who is living beyond his means is said to
bore with too big an auger
.… Husband and wife who have separated are said to have
split the blanket
.… Ill health is indicated by
like a lead nickel with a hole in it
or
like I’d been shot at and missed
.… The busybody is advised to mind his own business by … “Go on with your rat-killin’.” … Persons who are intimate are
as thick as three in a bed
.
3
In addition to the Marckwardt survey for the Linguistic Atlas, Harold Whitehall and Edson Richmond, of Indiana University, are engaged upon an independent examination of the State speechways. says Whitehall:
4
Its southern third belongs to what I call the transferred South,
viz.
, its fauna and flora have more in common with those of the States south of the Ohio than with those of the Indiana plain to the north. In dialect, too, it is the transferred South. From the Ohio to a point nearly two-thirds up the State the prevailing dialect is what some authorities like to call Hill Southern,
5
modified in centers such as Indianapolis with infiltrations from General American, but on the whole singularly typical of the matrix from which it originally
came. A high proportion of the population, particularly in the hill districts around Bloomington, is of Kentucky origin of a few generations back, and even in localities where it isn’t the prevailing speech-type seems to have carried all before it. Along the Ohio, particularly in the river towns, there seems to be a compromise dialect that blends Kentucky Highland Southern with a form of Pennsylvania speech that must have come down the river from somewhere in the Pittsburgh region. This mixture is especially marked around New Albany.
1
“The impression is general,” wrote Frank Luther Mott in 1922,
2
“that Iowa was settled from New England via New York and Ohio, and that in consequence its speech is generally Northern.” This impression turned out, on investigation, to be erroneous. Mott found that, in the early days of the State at least, its people were predominantly of Southern origin, and that their speechways showed it. Indeed, in a vocabulary of the 1833–46 era, he detected 136 examples of clear Southernisms as against but 62 examples of clear Yankeeisms. This finding was supported by the local historian, Frank I. Herriott, who came to the conclusion that Iowa “was first settled by sons of the Old Dominion, interspersed with the vigor of New England,”
3
and by the Census returns of 1860, which showed two settlers born in the South to one born in the North. At a later period the State, which was admitted to the Union on December 28, 1846, received large accessions of population from the stream of European immigration, and today it shows many speech-islands in which the basic dialect has been considerably modified. One of these was described in 1929 by Miss Katherine Buxbaum,
4
of the Iowa State Teachers College at Cedar Falls, who said:
My parents, German born, came to Iowa in the 60s from New York State, where they had learned their English casually.… With the project of farming in the new location they combined storekeeping, which brought them into contact with other pioneers of widely different speech traditions.… Our
Pennsylvania German neighbors, really Ohioans once removed from Pennsylvania, clung rather tenaciously to foreign idiom.
Still
was tacked illogically to sentences that seemed complete without it.
Was für
(
ein
) lost nothing in translation, for they always said “
What for
seeds are you going to plant?,” or “He asked me
what for
books I wanted.” My parents never used these expressions, but they did translate literally the German auxiliary,
sollen
, in its sense of “to be reported.” It was not until I studied the modals from a German grammar and learned
er sollte sagen
that I understood why my mother, in reporting a bit of village gossip, had stated guardedly: “He should have said that Ernest was a thief.”
Wentworth shows that the Pennsylvania German
all
, as in “The butter is
all
,” has moved into Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Kansas and Nebraska, and I am told by an Iowa informant
1
that the analogous use of the word as in “It’s in a bad neighborhood, is
all
” is common among Iowans “of high and low degree.” Another informant
2
says that the Pennsylvania German
waumus
, a jacket, was in general use in Monroe county, in southern Iowa, 1914–20.
3
The pioneer of dialect study in Kansas was Dr. W. H. Carruth (1859–1924), a native of Osawatomie who was graduated from the University of Kansas in 1880, took his Ph. D. at Harvard in 1893, and occupied various linguistic chairs at the former until 1913, when he became professor of comparative literature at Leland Stanford. His first contribution to the subject was a word-list published in the
Kansas University Quarterly
in 1892,
4
and he followed it with three
others during the five years thereafter.
1
He listed nearly a thousand words and phrases altogether, but many of them were marked General or credited to other States, though encountered in Kansas. A number, however, have not been reported elsewhere in the United States, among them,
coddy
, odd, out of fashion;
boo
, dried mucous;
cod
, a piece of deceit;
girling
, a girlish boy;
huckleberry
, indifferent, as in “He’s a
huckleberry
Christian”;
to jimmy with
, to meddle;
quill-wheel
, a rattletrap wagon;
skin-away
, a small boy;
skit
, a harmless lie;
sloomiky
, not neat;
snouge
, unfair;
Ely
, a success, as in “My name is
Ely”; to horsehead
, to cajole or wheedle;
rally-kaboo
, not up to standard;
tinker-tonker
, a small boy;
fizzle-dust
, anything very small;
Jumping Jesus
, a lame man;
skift
, a small quantity;
spool-pig
, a weakling;
bung-out
, empty; and to
crow-hop
, to back out.
Carruth turned up several words, later in widespread use, that seem to have been invented in Kansas,
e.g., calamity-howler
. He encountered others that were obviously loans,
e.g., lagniappe
from the French,
savey
from the Spanish,
wic-i-up
from some Indian language, and
smear case, land-louper
(
landlaufer
),
waumus
and
all
(as in “The corn is
all
”) from the German. He also credited the local use of
hole
, as in “The wind is from the north
hole
today,” to German example (Ger.
wetterloch
), and suggested that
blue-sky
, to indicate a bad investment, might be from the German
blauer dunst
. Becoming interested in these loans, he undertook an investigation of the islands of non-English speech in the State, and found them in 90 of its 105 counties. In 65 church services were still being held in foreign languages (1894), and in 41 there were schools so carried on. There were colonies of Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Hollanders, Czechs, Hungarians, Irish, Russians, Frenchmen (chiefly from Canada, but some from Switzerland), Italians and Welsh, beside Germans speaking half a dozen different dialects. Carruth made two reports on these speech-islands, each with a map.
2
In the first of them he made an excellent plea for dialect study in the State. Kansas, he said:
