Today, we look at the behind-the-scenes history of the "Dictionary of American Regional English" with Joan Houston Hall. We look at her personal journey into linguistics, the "word wagons" that traveled the country to collect oral histories, and the fascinating origins of regional words like "scrid" and "bobbasheely." Finally, Joan shares her top three book recommendations for fellow word lovers.
Today, we look at the behind-the-scenes history of the "Dictionary of American Regional English" with Joan Houston Hall. We look at her personal journey into linguistics, the "word wagons" that traveled the country to collect oral histories, and the fascinating origins of regional words like "scrid" and "bobbasheely." Finally, Joan shares her top three book recommendations for fellow word lovers.
"Dictionary of American Regional English" (DARE)
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| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. I'm here today with Joan Houston Hall, longtime editor of "DARE," the "Dictionary of American Regional English," also former president of the American Dialect Society and former president of the Dictionary Society of North America, a true woman of words. Joan, thank you so much for being here.
Joan Hall: Oh, it's my pleasure.
Mignon Fogarty: You bet. So in the main segment, we've already talked about some of my favorite words, but you know, actually, before we get to more words, I would love to hear how you got started, because I read that it was because you could not get into the classes you wanted.
Joan Hall: Well, actually, that's true. When I tried to register at Emory University in my first year of grad school, I ended up in a History of the English Language course because a different one that I had wanted was full. And the professor, named Lee Pederson, in this course said, "Well, you're going to be writing a paper on Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. But if you do not want to write one on Modern English, you can help me do interviews in rural Georgia." So I thought, "Hey, I have ten papers anyway this quarter. I'll do some interviews." And it was a really fun experience.
Mignon Fogarty: What were some of your favorite times out doing those interviews?
Joan Hall: Oh, well, I mentioned in the earlier part of the podcast talking with a woman who asked me to come back in the evening and finding out that she meant one o'clock where I meant 4:30. But another one was when I was interviewing an elderly African American man. He was a hundred, I believe.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, wow.
Joan Hall: He was very unusual because he had a large farm and had been a very prosperous farmer, and he was also very widely read. And it turns out that was because his grandmother had been blind and it was his job to read to her. So I was sitting on the front porch with him asking, "What do you call the shelf over a fireplace? What do you call this and that?" He was answering them all very patiently and kindly, and I thought of myself as this professional field worker, and he leaned over and he said, "What's a little girl like you doing so far from her mama?"
Mignon Fogarty: And what did you say?
Joan Hall: I said, "Oh, my husband's out there in the car." I was a little flummoxed.
Mignon Fogarty: And the interviews are, you know, the most important part of the dictionary. But there you also drew on published, like, written sources as well, didn't you?
Joan Hall: Yes, we did. It's a historical dictionary, and that means we try to include a quotation with the very earliest instance of each sense or word that we can find, plus enough others to show the history of the word. And sometimes that will be not a very long period, but other times it will be right up to the year just before publication. So it's as full a history of the word as we can provide, and that just works alongside the fieldwork that we collected.
Mignon Fogarty: And what's the yearly range from when you started collecting to sort of the end of the, like, big part of the project?
Joan Hall: We started the fieldwork in 1965, and that went through 1970. At the same time that the field workers were out there doing their work, other people were collecting quotations from newspapers, magazines, novels, histories, poems—all sorts of written materials. So we tried to get as good a selection of written materials as we could. But as the volumes were published over a period of 30 years, of course, the options for finding quotations, given our digital materials now, just expanded tremendously. So in the later volumes, there's much more documentation than there was in the earlier volumes.
Mignon Fogarty: Is there an archive, a scriptorium like they have at the "Oxford English Dictionary" or Merriam-Webster?
Joan Hall: Well, all of our materials are now in the University of Wisconsin archives, so everything can be found. And I spent the years after my retirement making a very detailed index of everything—some 400 or so boxes of materials that we sent to the archives. One of the really useful things is that Fred Cassidy was a correspondent with practically every linguist in the country over his many years in the field. So if you're researching the works of a particular scholar and want to find correspondence, you're likely to find it in the "DARE" archives.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, I would not have thought of that. Interesting. So if somebody wants to sort of begin experiencing "DARE"—I mean, of course they can start on the website and you have—there's—it's not free, but there are a hundred sample words so you can get a feeling for what it has before you subscribe. But what would sort of be the next step that you would recommend for someone who wants to dig deeper?
Joan Hall: Well, one of the really fun parts of the "DARE" website, the dare.wisc.edu, is that we include all of our newsletters. And particularly in the early ones, we have a feature called "Field Worker Reminiscences." The field workers, who at that point had been 30 or 40 years away from their experiences, were reminiscing. And since many of them had kept diaries, they had good sources of anecdotes and their stories about what it was like either to work from a word wagon or just from their own car—they're amazing. That's a very fun place to start just to get a feel for how this was done. There are lots of other parts of the "DARE" website that illustrate particular parts of the process. And there is a link to a place at the University of Wisconsin's Memorial Library where the complete audio recordings of all of our informants are available for use. So you can choose a place, you can choose a topic, you can choose whatever you want from the index there and hear people from 1965 to '70.
Mignon Fogarty: My imagination is just running wild right now. Okay, I'm imagining a documentary about the word wagons and the students who went out to do this. I am imagining, you know, novels set in, the protagonist being a researcher going out and talking to people in the field like this. I mean, it sounds like such an inspirational archive of information with just probably some of the best anecdotes you will ever find.
Joan Hall: I think that's true, and I hope you follow up on your instincts.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, maybe one of our listeners should, at least. So, why don't we go on to some of—what are some of your favorite words that we did not get to in the main episode?
Joan Hall: Oh, one of my favorites is "scrid," S-C-R-I-D. We learned from the materials we had on hand that it means a fragment of something, a little bit of the whole. And it was used in New England, especially Maine. And I had written up the entry and I thought, "Oh, this is such a great regional term." And then I did some internet research and I found a few other New England quotations, which was great.
And then I found some lathe maker in, I think it was Santa Clara, California—maybe it was Palo Alto. Yes, I think it was Palo Alto—who used it in a commentary on a blog. He said “I needed just a scrid more material." I thought, "Oh no, this has jumped the country. It's no longer where it's supposed to be." So I decided to email the guy. I said, "Do you happen to remember where you learned this word?" He said, "Oh yeah, my girlfriend's from Maine and she taught it to me."
Mignon Fogarty: Of course, and that's how it spreads. Another one—I'm not sure how to pronounce this. Is it "bob-a-sheely" or "bo-ba-sheely"?
Joan Hall: Bobbasheely. Oh yes, that's a great word.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Joan Hall: In our fieldwork, there was a question about what you call a good friend. So we had things like "bosom buddy," "great pals," all sorts of things. Now it would be "besties" and things like that, but there was one person from Texas who said, "Oh, they're big bobbasheelys." The way the field worker had written it, it looked as though it might be Irish. We checked all the Irish sources—nothing. And for a long time we could not find anything. But then we discovered in a Faulkner novel that it was used as a verb; the character said, "You and Sweet Thing bobbasheely on down to the hotel."
It was in the right region—it was not Texas, but I think it was Mississippi. And so that gave us a little clue. Then we found another instance of it meaning a good friend. So all of these little tidbits festered in my mind. And I finally found a reference in a journal called "Dialect Notes" from early in the 20th century saying that it was from a Choctaw word. And the University of Wisconsin libraries just happened to have a good Choctaw glossary. So I looked through all the B entries—found nothing. But I decided, "Okay, I'm going to find this." So I looked through every entry until I got to “eetebobbasheely,” and I looked at it and it said, "my brother with whom I was suckled."
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, wow.
Joan Hall: So obviously a very close relationship, and that's the source of "bobbasheely." And it's used mostly in Mississippi, some in Arkansas, and others very closely related. So we published something about this in a query and we got a letter from someone who had been doing historical research into Aaron Burr and his—what was it? A duel...
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, yeah.
Joan Hall: Anyway, people he was corresponding with signed their letters with "Bobbasheely" before their name. And so ultimately that became our earliest citation for the word, but we rounded out the picture by getting this historical information. And then after we published it, we got letters from people saying, "Oh, my Boy Scout camp in Mississippi, we called each other bobbasheelys," and then there's a small college in Mississippi where the yearbook is called "The Bobbasheely," so it still exists—maybe not very widely, but people remember it, and it has this wonderful history.
Mignon Fogarty: That is wonderful. So I'm trying to imagine how they used it to sign their name. Was it like, "Bobbasheely, Aaron Burr"? Or like—was it more—was it like "Comrade Aaron Burr," or was it more like "Your devoted servant, Aaron Burr"? How were they meaning it?
Joan Hall: It was not "Bobbasheely" in the name; I should have said it was "Bobbasheely," comma, next line, the name. So it was just, like, a sign off.Â
Mignon Fogarty: Okay, so like "Yours truly," "Your dear—your dearest friend," something like that.
Joan Hall: Right. Mm-hmm.
Mignon Fogarty: Wild. Oh, that is so neat. I, you know, again, I'm like, someone should make a word game based on the words in the dictionary too. Like, there's so much here that people should do things with.
Joan Hall: I hope someone will.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, Joan, thank you so much for being here. I think that we're going to end with your book recommendations. We always ask everyone, they’re three books that have stuck with you over time, that were especially meaningful to you, that you might recommend to a friend or that would make a great gift.
Joan Hall: My all-time favorite fiction book is by Wallace Stegner called "Angle of Repose." And it is set both in the late 1960s and a century earlier, with the contemporary protagonist—a historian who has recently been divorced and has discovered he has a bone disease, so he cannot get out of a wheelchair—and he is trying to find meaning in life. So he decides to write a biography of his grandparents.
And so we go back and forth between the contemporary and the historical. But the grandmother was kind of a New York socialite—not New York City, but upstate New York—who married an unlikely suitor, a guy who was a mining engineer who wanted to live in the West. And she agreed to go with him to the most remote and rustic places she could imagine as he worked on various mining projects. And so the relationship between those two people and the contemporary grandson was very interesting. And I found this book frustrating, because the relationships were so difficult. In many ways, it was endearing because you really like these people, and it was ultimately heartbreaking because the grandparents endured a tragedy that meant that they could never be close again. They lived side by side, but the closeness of their relationship was just gone. And Stegner is one of my favorite authors, so he certainly did a good job with that.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Joan Hall: A very different one, much more contemporary, is by an Irish author named Claire Keegan. And the book I'm thinking of was published in 2010 in the UK but in 2022 in the US, and it’s called "Foster." It's a novella, so very short, about an Irish family—a very boorish father and a mother who already has six or eight children and is expecting another one. She decides that her nine-year-old daughter could spend the summer with some shirttail relatives in another community. So it's the exploration by the child of life that's very different, and her recognition that it's not just different because she has enough to eat now or she has school clothes or other things she would not have had, like a bath in which she was the only person to use the water...
Mignon Fogarty: Oh.
Joan Hall: ...but more importantly, that parents can be tender. And it turns out that these foster parents had lost their own son, and for them it's a relearning to love, and it's a very tender book, and I highly recommend it.
Mignon Fogarty: That sounds wonderful.
Joan Hall: Yeah. And a more word-related book is by Kory Stamper called "Word by Word." Have you read that?
Mignon Fogarty: I have, yeah. I love Kory's writing.
Joan Hall: She's very witty, also very serious, and gives a wonderful explanation or reminiscence of what it was like to learn to be a dictionary editor, including what you do when you realize that the definition of "nude" in Merriam-Webster implies—this is "nude" in terms of a color, not unclothed—"nude" implies that nude means the color of the skin of a white person.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Joan Hall: And so how do you rectify that? And it was a very interesting explanation of how the group decided to tackle this and come to a better resolution.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no, it's a great story. Actually, I'm talking to her in about a month about her next book that's coming out that is about colors, so I just started reading that. But of course, it's wonderful and I'm looking forward to finishing it. But yeah, her first book, "Word by Word"—yeah, also fabulous.
Joan Hall: So I would recommend all three of those.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, those are great. Thank you so much, Joan. Thank you for being here and thank you for all the work you've done on "DARE" over the years too.
Joan Hall: Oh, well, you know, it was the job of a lifetime and I feel incredibly lucky.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Yeah, sounds like a dream job. Where should people go to, you know, support "DARE," to find "DARE," and anything else you might want them to find?
Joan Hall: Anyone who would like to contribute can go to giving at uwsupport.org.
Mignon Fogarty: And can they designate that this is for "DARE"?
Joan Hall: Yes, they can look it up on the list of opportunities and give it to "DARE."
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Wonderful. It's so—so, and does subscribe—does subscribing—I imagine subscribing helps too, right?
Joan Hall: Oh yes, it does. We do get royalties from University Press.
Mignon Fogarty: Good. So either way you can support this amazing project. And you can also look up those hundred, you know, sample words if you want to get a sense of what they're doing. And you can ask your library to get a subscription so that you can dig in even deeper and hear all those wonderful recordings.
Joan Hall: I hope people do that.
Mignon Fogarty: Thank you so much. Again, that's Joan Houston Hall, longtime editor of the "Dictionary of American Regional English." Thank you so much, Joan.
Joan Hall: You're very welcome.