1223. This week, Valerie Fridland steps in for Mignon and sits down with linguist Allison Burkette of the Linguistic Atlas Project at the University of Kentucky. They look at what "lightwood" and "chifforobe" reveal about landscape and colonial contact, how "kindling" gave us "Kindle" and "Tinder," and the 380-plus recorded terms for cornbread. Then they look at why words rarely truly "die," even when the practices behind them fade.
1223. This week, Valerie Fridland steps in for Mignon and sits down with linguist Allison Burkette of the Linguistic Atlas Project at the University of Kentucky. They look at what "lightwood" and "chifforobe" reveal about landscape and colonial contact, how "kindling" gave us "Kindle" and "Tinder," and the 380-plus recorded terms for cornbread. Then they look at why words rarely truly "die," even when the practices behind them fade.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Valerie Fridland: Hi, I'm Valerie Fridland, and I'm filling in for Mignon this week. And with me on the show today, I'm talking with Allison Burkette, who's a linguist and professor at the University of Kentucky. Now, her work explores language variation, dialects, and the ways that language reflects regional and cultural identity. She's also the director of the Linguistic Atlas Project, which is a major archive documenting regional speech across the United States. And last, but not least, she's the author of "Dialectology" and "The Linguistic Atlas Project." Allison, welcome to the show today!
Allison Burkette: Thanks so much, Valerie. I'm really happy to be here.
Valerie Fridland: Well, I'm excited to talk to you, because you and I have known each other for a while as linguists, and I have found your work really useful in my own. But for those that are not linguists, what exactly is a linguistic atlas?
Allison Burkette: Well, a linguistic atlas is a collection, I guess it makes sense, of maps. But it's maps of different places where people use different words for the same object, or the same type of interaction, or the same sort of social situation. And so, for instance, we want to know the difference between Northern speech and Southern speech, and whether they say "pop," "soda," or "Coke." I think that's probably the most commonly understood example, but this is actually something that we study on a scientific level.
Valerie Fridland: Right. And of course, everybody knows it's actually Coke. Just putting it out there as a Southerner.
Allison Burkette: Same. Yes, it is.
Valerie Fridland: For everybody else, it might be "pop" or "soda," but the OG is Coke. Right. And I remember growing up, we did things in a "skillet," and some other people called it a "frying pan," and then there's different names for "green beans" that people have. So those are the kinds of things that you're looking at in linguistic atlas work, correct?
Allison Burkette: Yeah. Those are great examples.
Valerie Fridland: Okay. So, we've done linguistic atlas work as linguists for a while in an area called "dialectology." But things change, and the way we talk changes over time, also the objects that we're talking about. So what are you asking about today in this kind of digital new world with all these new different things that we have, than maybe what they did 50, 75 years ago?
Allison Burkette: Well, actually, I think what's kind of interesting about the atlas is a lot of the core vocabulary that we're investigating is some of the same vocabulary that was investigated 50, 70 years ago. And so what we want to look at is this idea that what people called something then is not the same as what people call it now. And so we're kind of interested in the same set of vocabulary, but just looking at how the way that people use that vocabulary changes over time. And so sometimes words stick around, but start to mean something different. Sometimes you've got the case where there are a number of words for the same thing, and what that top choice is for people who are speaking might change over time. So the kinds of things, though, that we're interested in asking about, I mean, honestly, it's everyday stuff, right? It's everyday objects around the house, rooms of the house, furniture in your house, everyday things around the farm, for those of us that live on farms. That actually probably is the thing that's changed the most, is people don't live on farms like they did 100 years ago. We also ask people how they describe social situations, and even things like, what do you say if you've cleaned your plate and someone asks you if you want a second helping, and you don't want a second helping? Do you just say "no"? Do you say "No, thank you"? Do you say, "Oh, I'm full," or "I'm full as a tick," or, whatever it is. And that's something that's kind of very regional, the way that that particular question is answered.
Valerie Fridland: Right. And especially being full as a tick. I can imagine. We don't really have ticks where I live, so no one would say that.
Allison Burkette: Yeah, where I grew up, they say it all the time.
Valerie Fridland: Exactly. Exactly. And I've seen a full tick, and they are pretty full.
Allison Burkette: Yes, it is kind of a gross thing to say at the dinner table, frankly.
Valerie Fridland: It really is. Yes, especially nowadays, it's like the anathema of what you want to say at the dinner table, since they cause that allergy now.
Allison Burkette: Exactly. Exactly.
Valerie Fridland: Okay, so let's jump into some of the words that you've studied, because I find one in particular really fascinating, because it says so much not only about how things have changed, like you talked about, and the words we use, but also it has some really interesting relationships to words I never thought about. So I'm not going to give that away, but the word I'm thinking of is the word for the wood we use to start a fire. So how would you ask that question, and then what are the options, and what does it tell us?
Allison Burkette: Well, you should have been an atlas interviewer, because you did a great job of asking the question. And that question would be: What do you call the little pieces of wood that you use to start a fire? And so the most common answer to that, and certainly the most common answer now, would be "kindling." And so you've got little pieces of wood, but there are a number of terms for this that are particular to different regions. And so, for instance, I mean, listeners who are talking about starting fires now might not use this particular word, but back when the interviews were conducted in the 1930s and '40s, a lot of people said "lightwood." You know, and it's just kind of—
Valerie Fridland: Lightwood?
Allison Burkette: Yeah, "lightwood." And various pronunciations of "lightwood," like "lightered," was one of the pretty common pronunciations of that. People would call it "fatwood," and what I've come to understand, sort of looking at this body of terms, is if you see terms like "fatwood" or "rich pine" or "rich knots," what people are actually referring to is like the resin that's in chunks of wood. And it would be chunks of wood that are sort of discard pieces that could then be collected and used as "kindling."
Valerie Fridland: Interesting. And didn't you say, I think I remember in the article that you wrote about this, that sometimes it's also just collections of like little twigs or bushes or something like that that has changed, too?
Allison Burkette: Yeah, one of the things that I looked at was the difference between the top terms that were given in American interviews versus the top terms that were given in England's version of the Linguistic Atlas Project, which would be the "Survey of English Dialects." And so the two projects are, I guess, kind of kissing cousins. And a lot of the terms overlap for both projects, which is fabulous for us, because then we can compare like British English to American English. In British English and in, for instance, Scottish English, one of the most common terms had to do with pieces of brush or shrub, right? And the most common terms in American English had to do with sticks and parts of trees. And if you think about it, it reflects a difference in the physical landscape of the people who are answering the question. And so you've got England and Scotland kind of with rolling hills, and the brush, and the firs, and the gorse, and things like that. And then you have, for instance, the American South, and you have the Pine Belt, where you're going to have a lot of pine tree-oriented references. Yeah, so that difference in actual physical landscape is one of the things that created the difference between the vocabulary of starting a fire in England versus America.
Valerie Fridland: I love that, because what it sort of shows you is how much these words don't just tell us what people say and maybe whether they're separate or together, but also how what they encounter socially, culturally, even physically actually you can kind of trace from the words that they have that have emerged and diverged over time. It's just really cool.
Allison Burkette: That's right. And one of the other things that's cool is if you take it from the other direction. So because the Linguistic Atlas was founded in 1929, which means there's a centennial coming up in just a few years—it's hard to believe. I was not alive when it was first started, just to make that clear.
Valerie Fridland: You were not doing that original atlas work.
Allison Burkette: I was not doing this original atlas work, which is unfortunate. I'd like to go back in time and sit in on a couple of interviews, but that's okay. But what this means from my perspective is if I'm looking at data that was collected at this point almost 100 years ago, I think a very valid question would be: Who cares? Like, what difference does it make what somebody was saying 100 years ago? And I say it makes a lot of difference, because like you were saying, it's not just the vocabulary. What we have in the vocabulary is also a record of culture at a different time. And we've got a lot of interview data, for instance, from mid-century, so mid-20th century. You know, a lot of people are fascinated with mid-century modern, and if you want to know what it sounds like, I can tell you. And if you want to know what people called the actual mid-century modern furniture that we all like so much, you know what? I can tell you. Because the atlas data actually encodes culture, and I think that's something that a lot of people overlook, that it's never just about the vocabulary. It's always about the things that that vocabulary is tied to.
Valerie Fridland: Right, and I think that's really an important point, because I know there are a lot of shows on etymology and that trace words back, and that is pretty cool itself. Like, we love to see the history of how words have evolved, but I think the deeper, more important thing that we can get from looking at words over time is these sort of photos or images of what life was like at that time, and the way that people interacted, and the things that they talked about, and that really changes, which actually brings me to something you had brought up in one of your articles, which is that a lot of times kids or young people don't have words for things that you ask about. Tell me a little bit about what that tells us culturally.
Allison Burkette: You know, "kindling" is a great example of that, because if somebody asked me when I was younger, "How do you make a fire?" depending on what kind of house you live in, you might be like, "Well, I flick on a light switch, and the fire comes on." Exactly, "Start a match maybe." That is how I start a fire. So when some of these daily practices and some of these like just ordinary, day-to-day activities, when those change, vocabulary changes with them, and I think that makes a lot of sort of intuitive sense. But something else that tends to happen and that you can see if you take sort of a wide-angle look at atlas data is you see that the words might not be used the same, but they rarely, rarely disappear. And so just to kind of go back to this fire-starting thing, you've got the fact that we use the term "Kindle" for the Amazon digital reader, right? So "Kindle" from "kindling," and it just means to excite, right, to inflame, in a good way. And we also have "Tinder," right, the dating app. And so, again, that's something tied to that meaning of trying to get something started, trying to create a spark. And so we might not necessarily immediately connect "Kindle" and "Tinder" to the act of starting a fire, but metaphorically, it makes a lot of sense.
And so, like you were saying, if the younger generation, for example, stops doing a particular practice or they don't engage in a particular daily activity, that vocabulary for that thing will change. I mean, usually, again, I can't stress enough that the death of words I think is usually wildly exaggerated. I mean, words rarely, rarely just completely go away. It happens, but not as often as you think. But, for example, in a study that was done in Roswell, Georgia, they interviewed a lot of young people for this study, and a lot of the people that they interviewed, when they asked them, "What do you call a pie that's baked in a deep dish that has fruit in it?" a lot of them did not have a term for that specifically. They could come up with brand names, like Sara Lee or Marie Callender's or whatever their preferred pie was, but couldn't necessarily come up with a name like "cobbler," or a "crumble," or like all of these other things, "pandowdy." I mean, there are just so many terms actually for "cobbler" historically, but because our practices have changed, the number that's part of our daily vocabulary has dwindled.
Valerie Fridland: Right, and I think that's a really great example. I grew up it was a "cobbler," and I remember loving "cobbler"—who doesn't love a good "cobbler"? But I remember somebody else calling it something like a "crisp," which to me when I heard that term, because someone used it in reference to something that looked different than a "cobbler" for what I had, I actually thought of those as two different things. But I know that sometimes people just where you grow up, it's how you tend to make them, and so they actually are different, but only because really they're the same thing made with different ingredients. And so it really gets to that idea you have that they don't—it's not that words die, it's that sometimes they develop new meanings or they expand or we start to repurpose them to mean slightly different things, which I think "cobbler" is a great example of that. And now you're making me hungry.
Allison Burkette: I know. I know, because one of the atlas questions certainly was about the deep-dish pie, and the speakers from New England used the terms "dumpling" and "pudding." And again, if you remember that this was almost 100 years ago, you can ask why would they use "dumpling" and "pudding," but think about the British connection to New England and that influence, that colonial influence, because the Brits would still call dessert "pudding," right? And those terms came over with early colonists and then just kind of settled and stayed for hundreds of years until the people were asked about it in the 1930s. And they answered, "Oh, that's an apple pudding," or "That's an apple dumpling," to mean the same thing that perhaps you and I would mean if we describe something as an "apple cobbler."
Valerie Fridland: Right. And I love that again, that tie to history that we get when we look at those words. And right, you think about New England, and they sort of had this longer term relationship with London, both in the way that they spoke, in terms of sounds, but also here we see in terms of the vocabulary that kept. I love that. And so now going back to "Tinder," I think one of the funny things when I was reading your article where you mention kindling's relationship to "Kindle" and "Tinder," is it's true that here we repurpose those words in these really novel contexts, right? This very technologically advanced kind of reader is sparking a fire, and then "Tinder," which is a dating app, to spark a fire romantically. And it's so interesting because I would bet a lot of people don't think of "Tinder" at all relating to this original meaning of that word, because it's become kind of a brand name, as we sort of often do with things. But it was such a revelation, because I thought, well, so obvious once you think about it, but it was really a fun little fun fact to discover in your article.
Allison Burkette: Yeah, and I've got to tell you, it's a fun fact that I ran across when I started looking at the groups of words that the atlas had for "kindling," because it didn't occur to me either until I saw it, and I'm like, "Oh, hey, that's—oh, okay, I know what that is."
Valerie Fridland: Right. So next time you are on "Tinder," right, think about how you're starting that fire.
Allison Burkette: That's right. That's right.
Valerie Fridland: So let me go back to something else you just mentioned, which is that mid-century modern that's all the rage right now, because this points to something else, and you referenced it, that is really fun when you look at regional terms and how they differ, which is the names we have for furniture. And kind of like you were talking about with "cobbler," it's very variable, it's sometimes based on history, but also sometimes we repurpose words. So we don't really necessarily always think they mean the same thing. So if I call it a "bureau" and you call it a "dresser," we may have different images for what that represents, or they may be the same thing. Tell me a little more about the types of furniture variation in names that you have found, because I think that's a really fun area.
Allison Burkette: Yeah, and as anybody that knows me knows, I'm obsessed with "chest of drawers." And I grew up calling a "dresser" a "chest of drawers," and probably in casual conversation, a "chester drawers," which is very, very common. And it's interesting because with that set of vocabulary, because you've got, well, in the 1930s, "bureau" was the most common answer to "Hey, what do you call that piece of furniture in your bedroom that has drawers, that you maybe keep socks and underwear in?" People said "bureau." And, after that, I think most people probably say "dresser" now, and then you've got people like me that still say "chest of drawers," or just a "chest," or just "drawers." Or it could be getting into a slightly different, but related piece of furniture, like a "wardrobe," or a "chiffonier," which is a "chest of drawers." It does, and you can tell that's like such a Charleston word. It is, it's just a very—because they stayed in contact with French longer than other colonial areas. So like "chiffonier" and "semainier" were found within the speakers of that particular area around the Charleston area. And you also have a combination, "wardrobe" and "chiffonier." So if you can imagine a "wardrobe" if it's got big doors, and then one side of it has a bar to hang clothes, and the other side has either drawers or shelves, a lot of people would call that a "chifforobe." And that's a very New Orleans term for this particular piece of furniture. And so there are regional variations, a lot of which do have to do with contact with other speakers. And so, whether it's sustained contact in New England with London, as you said, or a sustained contact in like Charleston and Savannah with French and French fashion and French furniture, or if it's the melting pot that is New Orleans, you see it in the vocabulary.
But the "chest of drawers" vocabulary also, a lot of the variation that we see in what people call these pieces of furniture, it's hard to nail down sometimes whether people use different terms because they are from a different place or influenced by a different group, or whether they are referring to slightly different pieces of furniture. And so what's probably important to know about me and my background is I was raised in a house where my parents bought and sold antiques. So I spent my childhood on the weekend in antique stores being told not to touch things, right? So I was always helping to move furniture, all of this kind of stuff. And so in my household, there is a big difference between, for instance, like a "highboy," which is another kind of "chest of drawers," and a "chest of drawers," because a "highboy" would have legs, it's up a little bit higher, probably fewer drawers, it's very tall. There's also a difference between a "chest of drawers" and, for instance, a "sideboard" in my vocabulary, because my vocabulary has a "sideboard" in a dining room that holds like extra plates or placemats or that kind of thing, sort of dining storage, whereas, again, "chest of drawers" would be in a bedroom. But point is, I'm not going to claim any kind of expert knowledge of antiques, but I have a little bit more experience than a normal person when it comes to antiques and older pieces of furniture, and so my vocabulary might be a little bit more specific and a little bit more sort of fine-grained. Whereas for other people, they just might use "sideboard" for the piece of furniture in their bedroom, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Valerie Fridland: Right, I definitely don't have the vocabulary you did, because I grew up in that sort of antithesis of the household you grew up. I don't think we had a single antique in our house, nor many words for them. But I did grow up saying "chest of drawers" the same way that you did, which I probably, I don't know, you could tell me better than I would know, sounds to me like it would be Southern, because that's where I grew up. Is that more widespread?
Allison Burkette: I grew up in the South, too, but it was actually pretty widespread. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: Okay, so that is one thing where the South is like everybody else, maybe. But I wouldn't have had all those other words, and you know what's interesting when you said "chifforobe," and you're talking about, it's one of those sort of wardrobes with a bar on one side and drawers on the other, the only place you really see that a lot anymore is in hotels. Hotels tend to often have those, but it never occurred to me there's a separate word for them. I would have called them a "wardrobe." So now I have a new word. I'm always going to sound very, very smart whenever I go to a hotel and put my clothes in the "chifforobe."
Allison Burkette: And the interesting thing is, like back in the day, people would refer to a closet as a "wardrobe," because that's where you keep your clothes. That's where you keep your wardrobe. And so, it didn't get separated out to being a separate movable piece of furniture until later, because originally it was a "closet."
Valerie Fridland: Oh, that's interesting. When you probably just started getting more stuff and needed more room for all your clothes outside of the closet. Well, okay, you had also mentioned that you grew up calling it a "chester drawers," which is different, right? Not "chest of drawers," but you had kind of misheard it and it became this different word like "chester's drawers." And that, you know, sometimes you'll hear it referred to as an "eggcorn," because it's like mishearing something. So the word "eggcorn" comes from, of course, "acorn" being misheard as "egg corn." But there's also "all intents and purposes" that sometimes people mishear and then think it's just re-analyze it as "all intensive purposes." So "chester drawers" is an example of that. Have you found other things like that, that just because they're handed down and people just kind of mishear them that they sort of just make a new word up?
Allison Burkette: I certainly have a ton of anecdotal evidence of that happening, but it's harder to find like in the atlas data. And I'm sure they're there, because in any sort of set of responses to a particular question, you have a lot of responses that are only given by one or two people. And so I think that that's a perfect opportunity for someone to use a term that's particular either to them or their family or their really specific neighborhood or community.
Valerie Fridland: So sort of like a "familect," kind of.
Allison Burkette: Yeah. Yeah, kind of like a "familect."
Valerie Fridland: So have you met other people that say "chester drawers," or was that a Burkette family--
Allison Burkette: Nope. Nope, it's all over the atlas.
Valerie Fridland: So that was pretty widespread.
Allison Burkette: Yeah, and there were actually even enough of them in the atlas data that we pulled it out as a separate entry. You know what I mean? So we have an entry for "chest of drawers," but then there's another one further down that's just "chester drawers." And there's some people who just call it a "chester."
Valerie Fridland: I love that. That's pretty funny. And then so, you know, one of the things that you also, just talking about these objects, like whether, you know, you have an object that's a "chifforobe" in your house and how that would inspire you to talk about your experiences, how do these atlases work in terms of getting people to tell you these stories that give you words that you wouldn't--I mean, because this is not like something in casual conversation, "Hey, how you doing? Chifforobe." I mean, it doesn't just come up like that, right? How do you elicit these? What are the types of strategies, and then how do you find that maybe heirlooms or things like having a fireplace there when you're doing the interviews, how that kind of helps get these aspects that you're looking at and these words you're looking at out?
Allison Burkette: Yeah, that is a really good question. So the earliest interviews, they were done face-to-face, and they were done by professionally trained linguists who were familiar with International Phonetic Alphabet and could go in and ask people questions and write down the answers in International Phonetic Alphabet. So this was before your recording device could fit in your hand, right? So this is when you'd have to have a phonograph to make an aluminum disc recording of not the entire interview, because the interviews were six to eight hours long. It's that many questions. Yes. And so we do have aluminum discs that have like 12 10-minute snippets, because that's all they hold, of interviews, but the vast majority of their earlier ones, we just have written answers. And so the fieldworkers would go to a town, and most of the fieldworkers, especially in the earliest surveys, were men. They would go into town and they were looking for residents of rural communities. They did talk to a lot of farmers, so the farming questions were much more appropriate back then. And they would ask, for instance, the town postmaster or postmistress, or they would ask the town librarian, and they would say, "We're studying language and we're studying the way that vocabulary is different from region to region. Do you know somebody that would be good for us to talk to? Somebody that likes to talk, likes to tell stories?" And then they would get pointed to a resident of that town, often an older or elderly resident of the town, and they would just walk to the door and try and explain the project, "We're doing this investigation of the way that dialects differ from region to region. You know, would you have time to talk to us over the course of a few days?" And they would ask questions like the one I asked you about, you know, what do you call the piece of furniture in your bedroom. But they would ask like that, they would either describe the object or the event that they wanted the term for, or, as you mentioned, if they are sitting in this person's living room—and can you imagine if somebody came to your door and knocked and said, "Do you have a couple of afternoons to spend with me asking questions?" and then just invite them into your home and serve them tea and make them lunch? I mean, we've got all kinds of stories about how gracious with their time and their information a lot of the speakers were that they talked to. But if they're in somebody's house, and perhaps in the kitchen, perhaps in the parlor, right, or the living room, they could point to an object and say, "What do you call this piece of furniture? What is this that I'm sitting in? What are you sitting on? Is that a," and they try not to say "sofa" or "couch," "but what do you call that piece of furniture that's upholstered that you're sitting on?" And then they would record the answers in International Phonetic Alphabet. So we get a sense of, at least, the pronunciation of the answers to the questions in addition to what the actual term was.
Valerie Fridland: Right, so people like me who study the sounds and how they've changed over time, because you study more of the vocabulary and things like that, that is kind of the only data we have, or a lot of times, I mean, other than rhyming schemes and things like that, that really tells us, "Oh, 100 years ago was this sound pronounced the same as it is today?" So it was very lucky for us, and we hope that those fieldworkers knew what they were doing.
Allison Burkette: Well, they were trained within an inch of their lives, so they knew what they were doing.
Valerie Fridland: Right, and they earned a living doing this, right? I mean, this was paid work, because I think you look at the intensity of it, and it's hard to imagine now to go to people's house and ask for two days of their time and then just pepper them with questions with a lot of training that you needed to record it appropriately. So these were paid positions that these people had. And usually were they students or...?
Allison Burkette: They were professors. They were the actual professors. Yes, it's not until I mean, these interviews have been ongoing since basically 1931. And the ones that were done in like the 1970s and the 1980s in the Gulf States, they did send out graduate students, even some undergraduate students. And so, you know, that's something that when you're looking at this as data, quite frankly, as a researcher, you have to kind of keep in the back of your mind. But luckily, the ones done in the 1970s and '80s were tape-recorded. And so there's not the same kind of pressure to really train someone how to use International Phonetic Alphabet the way that there was back in the beginning.
Valerie Fridland: That's so amazing. What a great story. I just love what this tells us about ourselves, about how we change, about where we get our influences from. It tells a great story. I think it's a really important thing that people don't think about vocabulary having that ability to tell us these things. So I love that we have these records. I mean, we're incredibly lucky there were people interested in these questions 100 years ago so that we preserved some of our history, because these, they don't die, but when you fall into disuse and you repurpose them, so if the only way you're talking about how you start a fire is referring to the "Kindle" that you're reading and the "Tinder" dating app that you're using, it doesn't tell you anything about 100 years ago what, you know, the difference in the landscape or the physical environment or the experiences that these people had that brought us those words. So having those records is super important. It's been so much fun talking to you, Allison. I do have one last question that's just totally out of my own curiosity. Do you have a favorite term that you've studied, other than obviously the ones that we've talked about? Is there something that you're like, "Oh my gosh, this is the coolest word in history and variations"? I'm just curious.
Allison Burkette: You know, I do. I absolutely love the terms for "cornbread." Because they asked people, they're like, "What do you call bread that's made out of cornmeal?" And it's a simple enough question, right? "Cornbread" was the most common answer. However, there were over 380 different, like unique, different terms for "cornbread" if you look at the data like basically down the East Coast of the United States. So everything from "Johnnycakes," which is very Northern, to "corn pone," which is very Southern, and a whole bunch of stuff in between. So yeah, "cornbread" is one of my favorites. One of the most prolific interviewers for the Linguistic Atlas, his name was Raven McDavid. And he was, apparently, what today we would call a foodie. And so when he asked people about "cornbread," and they were like, "Cornbread," he was like, "But what if you molded it into little balls and then fried it in deep fat? What if you added little pieces of meat? You know, what if you used egg and then baked it and then ate it with a spoon?" And so "spoon bread" is another relatively, or at least was back then, relatively common answer to the "cornbread" question. But he got a lot of information just by making these like little adjustments, you know, just by asking people for particular details: "Well, what do you call it when you do this? What do you call it when you do this?" And that's one of my favorite sets basically because it's so big. And it shows influences from Native American vocabularies. It shows influences from just a ton of different preparation--different preparations had different names. There's such a thing as "hoecakes." That, as far as I can tell, really did, because you know how etymologies are, you can have a lot of folk etymologies, which are valuable, right? But as far as I can tell, this one is true, and it did come from the idea of using a hot back of a hoe in the middle of a field, like building a little fire, putting your hoe in it, and then putting batter on that hoe to make a "hoecake" in the field.
Valerie Fridland: I'm sure that was very sanitary.
Allison Burkette: I'm sure it was delicious.
Valerie Fridland: Just for people, speaking of farm implements people may not know, right, a hoe is sort of like a pitchfork, correct?
Allison Burkette: No, a hoe's got the flat--it's more like a shovel.
Valerie Fridland: A shovel, okay. See, I'm the perfect example of someone who has never worked on a farm. So, yes, so that you'd make that in the heat. And, yeah, you know, it's funny because "Johnnycake" and corn cakes, I think a lot of people think of "Johnnycakes" as pancakes, but that's a very old term, and it is originally a corn cake. And I believe that it's one of the, if I'm not mistaken, and I can't remember which one, but I think one of the presidents of the United States, the early presidents, was the first to have written that term, if I'm not mistaken. I might be wrong there, but I believe that it is one of these early like, you know how Thomas Jefferson was very, very wordy, he was a wordsmith, but we actually had a lot of the early Founding Fathers that brought words like that, and they were probably in use, but they got written down by the presidents because they recorded a lot of things and kept diaries. And if I'm not mistaken, I believe "Johnnycakes," that's one of its first written citations. But don't quote me on that, I'm not a specialist.
Allison Burkette: Well, see, I learned something today, too. I will check that out. Yeah.
Valerie Fridland: Well, we should check it before we go with it for sure. But Allison, it has been a delight. Where can people find you if they want to get more information?
Allison Burkette: They can find us at linguisticatlasproject.org. And if for some reason you have someone out there who really likes data, we have a GitHub repository, and I'm happy to share the QR code for that. And they can poke around in data sets. We are working very diligently on building another website that will let you go in and map things. And so you would be able to choose the specific responses and see where people use those. And we'll start off with the East Coast and hopefully move our way across the country as we keep processing our data.
Valerie Fridland: Oh, well, I definitely want to know when that's live, because that would be great. First of all for my classes, but also just I would love to be able to plot those and sort of see how things have changed over time and also where people say these different terms. Allison, it's been truly a delight. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Allison Burkette: Well, thank you so much for having me.