American Language Supplement 2 (41 page)

Some of Shewmake’s conclusions were challenged by Hans Kurath in
American Speech
, August, 1928, and by Argus Tresidder in the same journal, April, 1941, and Shewmake answered them in its columns in February, 1943. Tresidder resumed the discussion in December, 1943. He divided Virginia into four speech areas instead of the usual three – Tidewater, including the Eastern Shore; the Piedmont “extending from the fall-line to the slopes of the Blue Ridge, spreading out like an inverted funnel, two counties wide in the north and seven counties wide in the south, and embracing the largest part of the State”; the Valley and Ridge province, “made up of a very irregular series of linear ridges and valleys, including the Shenandoah,” and the Appalachian plateau, “at the very south-western corner of the State.”
³
He continued:

Tresidder sought to get a cross section of Virginia speech by having 254 of the girl students of Madison College, at Harrisonburg in the Shenandoah Valley, read a test passage of 195 words. Of these girls, all of them “from average middle-class families,” 74 were from Tidewater, 94 from the Piedmont, 76 from the Valley and Ridge province, and 10 from the Appalachian plateau. He concluded that “Virginia speech cannot be conveniently classified in geographical or ethnological divisions because in spite of physical and national differences the usages throughout the State, with some exceptions, are comparable.” His girls, of course, hardly provided “an entirely satisfactory basis for speculation about Virginia speech, since they were all from the same social level, all were women, and all were college students.” Perhaps these facts accounted in large part for the uniformities he noted: informants from the lower grades of society might have shown much greater differences. Even so he found a number of significant local usages, chiefly indicating that the maximum of elegance is in the Tidewater region, and that it declines steadily as one goes westward. Rather curiously, he found that the broad
a
was common only in
aunt, rather
and
can’t
.

Primer’s pioneer study of 1890 was devoted to the speech of the Northern Neck, between the Rappahannock and the Potomac. Of the palatal glide in
gyarden, gyirl, schyool
and their like he said: “the pronunciation is not general. Some consider it vulgar and avoid it,
but it can be heard in the best families.” He found both flat
a
and broad
a
in
pass, ask
, and
half
, and even in
calm
and
psalm
, but only broad
a
in
haunt
. He reported “the usual fluctuation” between
ee-ther
and
eye-ther
in Fredericksburg, and the absence of
r
from
door, more, war
and the like everywhere. Greet’s phonograph expedition of 1930 was to Williamsburg, between the York river and the James, not far from the Warwick region investigated by Green. He encountered difficulties, for the indigenes objected to having their speech recorded, even by a man whose middle name was Cabell, but in the end he accumulated 170 records, some of them of the speech of visitors from Richmond, Norfolk and Petersburg, all of which are in the same
Sprachgebiet
. On his return to his Columbia University dissecting-room to anatomize his specimens he found that the speech of the Williamsburg region was “rather rapid” and that “drawl and laziness” were not characteristic of it. The
o
in such words as
log
and
long
often became
ah
, that in
go
and
know
a diphthong made up of
o
and
oo
, the diphthong in
out
became a combination of the first vowel of
further
and something resembling the
u
of
full
, the
a
in
car
and
far
was prolonged in compensation for the loss of the
r
, and the
i
in
I, mind, my, while
and
why
tended to approximate
ah
.

Davis and Hill, in their survey of Virginia folk-song crooners in 1933, found the same differences between the speech of the various Virginia regions before reported by others. They also recorded a “tendency to reduce the forms of the strong verbs to two instead of three,” and even to one, but this is common to all forms of vulgar American. In Tresidder’s paper on “The Speech of the Shenandoah Valley,” published in 1937, he reported that it was “influenced by the Pennsylvania Germans and by the mountain people as well as by importations from eastern Virginia.” He listed, as German loans,
to schnitz
, to peel, and the phrases “The
salt
is
all
,” “
Give
me goodbye,” “It’s wettin’
down
out,” “
Would
you go to ride?,” “We’re
fresh
out of pork” and “You can have the cart
either
.” In a group of young women college students of the Valley he encountered such pronunciations as
melk
for
milk, cáydet
for
cadet, hangry
for
hungry, dahmitory
for
dormitory, bum
(with the
u
of
full
) for
bomb, wush
for
wish, roodge
for
rouge, arn
for
iron
, and
tard
for
tired
. Walsh, in 1940, reported that the so-called Cavalier accent
was “becoming modified” in eastern Virginia, and “sometimes losing its most conspicuous feature, the broad
a
.”
¹

Mrs. Nixon’s “Glossary of Virginia Words,” published in 1946 with a preface by Hans Kurath, is based upon 138 field records accumulated for the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. It is a list of about 275 terms, and all of them that have been reported in other parts of the country or in England are so marked. Unfortunately, the authorities consulted do not include Wentworth’s “American Dialect Dictionary,” published in 1944, and as a result a number of the terms appear as peculiar to Virginia though they are actually in use elsewhere,
e.g., to change
, to castrate, which Wentworth reports from West Virginia and which is also common in Maryland. Among those that seem to be exclusively Virginian are
corn-stack
, used on the Eastern Shore in place of
corn-crib
or
corn-house; dry-land frog
, a toad;
green-beans
, used west of the Blue Ridge for
string-beans; home-made cheese
, a Shenandoah term for
cottage cheese
or
smearcase; johnny-house
, a privy, “fairly common in the James valley and the southern part of the Blue Ridge”;
milk-gap
, used in the southern Blue Ridge for cow-pen;
ox
, a bull, “used on the lower Rappahannock in the presence of women”; and
steer
, also a bull, used “on the Eastern Shore, on the lower Rappahannock and in the southern Piedmont in the presence of women.” Wilson’s word-list of 1944 was gathered along the North Carolina border and also includes many North Carolina terms. Mrs. Nixon does not list
you-all
. Wilson says of it: “So much can be said about this much discussed pronoun that nothing is being said here. In spite of many clarifying articles on the subject there is still much misunderstanding.” But notwithstanding this despairing warning it will be tackled again in Chapter IX, Section 3.

Lowman, in his paper of 1936, reported that he had found no less than seven different variations of the diphthong in
house
in Virginia speech. His discussion was too technical to be summarized here, but the substance of it was that the substitution of a diphthong made up of either the
u
of
further
or the
a
of
sang
and the
u
of
full
– “the most widespread and generally considered the Virginia type” – was
“characteristic of the entire Piedmont north of the James,” of “a narrow strip south through Buckingham to Halifax county,” of “the Northern Neck peninsula between the Rappahannock and the Potomac,” of “the section between the upper Rappahannock and the upper James, of the Norfolk-Newport News area, and of the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay.” But with slight phonological differences he also found it in all other parts of the State – even among the Quakers of Loudoun county, the Scotch-Irish of the mountains, and the Germans of the Shenandoah Valley. Hench’s paper, read before the Modern Language Association in 1940, was accompanied by a list of terms gathered mainly in the vicinity of Charlottesville, in central Virginia. It included
albatross
, a kind of sail-boat;
to backstand
, to stand up for;
cow-bug
, a large beetle with hook-like horns;
cunny fingered
, butterfingered;
dick-in-a-minute
, immediately;
dirty-camp
, a brawl;
dog-trot house
, a house with an open passage between its two ends;
fairway
, a millrace;
flat-toned
, complete, absolute;
house-moss
, balls of dust;
inch
, a twelfth part of the daylight day (“I worked twelve
inches
today”: “I worked from dawn to dark”);
to newspack
, to spread gossip;
rink
, a pile of firewood, and
sag
, a gap in a mountain ridge.

Woodward’s word-list of 1946 was gathered at Salem, a town in the Shenandoah Valley, seven miles west of Roanoke. It consists mainly of terms in very wide American use,
e.g., all the farther, backhouse, contrary
(disobedient),
gyp
and
hickey
(a pimple), but also includes some not reported from other areas by Wentworth,
e.g., bird snow
, a late Spring snow;
breath-harp
, a harmonica;
clatterwhacking
, palaver;
gospel-fowl
, a chicken;
ice-pebble
, a hailstone;
misty-moisty
, threatening rain;
nibby
, inquisitive;
river-jack
, a stone from a stream, and
in a swither
, excited. He found Pennsylvania German influence in
pon hosh
(Ger.
pfannhase
).
Blue hen’s chickens
, usually applied to natives of Delaware, is used to designate the local gentry.

The speech of Washington differs little from that of Oregon. Some of its terms were listed by Benjamin H. Lehman in 1918.
¹
They show many loans from the argots of the Western cattlemen and lumbermen, but a few are of local origin,
e.g., mothback
, an apple grower;
stopper
, a lodger for the night;
chix
, a chicken (singular), and
palouser
, a greenhorn, a home-made lantern, or a sunset. The last is from
Palouse
, “the fertile, rolling region lying north of the Snake river in eastern Washington,” and
Palouse
in turn comes from the name of a tribe of Indians found by Lewis and Clark at the head of the Clearwater river.

In large part the speech of West Virginia is that of Appalachia, which has been dealt with a while back. But there are also signs of influence by the lowland speech of the South and even by Tidewater Southern, and traces of Pennsylvania infiltration are by no means lacking. In 1925 Carey Woofter, of West Virginia University, at Morgantown, enlisted his students in an effort to collect a vocabulary, and their gatherings were printed in
American Speech
two years later.
¹
They worked mainly in the eight counties lying in the valley of the Little Kanawha river, and so covered a region that was partly in the mountains and partly on lower ground. They got altogether more than 800 words and phrases, and the speech thus revealed turned out to be very interesting. Some of the locutions found that have not been reported elsewhere were:
beaslings
, the first milk of a fresh cow;
boar’s nest
, a camp of men without women;
bull’s breakfast
, a straw hat;
to brouge
, to idle;
chestnut
, thin soil on northern slopes;
to be cold cocked
, to be knocked out;
consaity
, hard to please;
to crow-hop
, to take an unfair advantage;
to drive
, to take a female animal to be bred;
to pound hair
, to drive a team;
to help Andy
, to do nothing;
another hog off the corn
, one less person to feed;
to lap
, to whip;
sight of the eye
, the pupil;
sprag
, a dead branch on a tree, and
trink
, a minnow used for bait. Some curious pronunciations were encountered,
e.g., ahdn’t
, hadn’t;
keerpet
, carpet, and
severial
, several. The Pennsylvania loans included
snits
, dried apples, and the widespread
all
, as in “The potatoes are
all
.”
The euphemisms in use were mainly Appalachian,
e.g., outsider
, a bastard;
to jape
, to have sexual intercourse;
male-hog
, boar, and
male-cow
, bull.
You all
was found and also
whistle-pig
for
ground-hog
, the former common to the whole South and the latter characteristic of Appalachia. The dialect examined, though it was mainly rural, showed some influence from the argot of lumbermen, and also a good many smart words and phrases from the big cities,
e.g., glad rags, to get one’s goat
, and
hard-boiled
. A year after this excellent vocabulary was published Lowry Axley criticised it in
American Speech
on the ground that many of the terms listed were used also “in the mountains of the South, in other sections of the South and perhaps in other parts of the country,” but this self-evident fact hardly needed laboring.
¹