DARE editor to discuss new regional English, dictionary uses

Wisconsinites celebrate a “golden birthday” when their age matches the day of the month that they were born: Those born on the 21st of March, for example, have a golden birthday when they turn 21.

It wasn’t always like that, according to Joan Houston Hall, chief editor of the one-of-a-kind Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). “Our earliest quote for ‘golden birthday’ is 1981,” she says.

Hall will discuss such linguistic revelations at a free lecture sponsored by the Language Institute on Wednesday, March 16, at noon in the Memorial Union (check Today in the Union for exact room). In addition to relating how DARE came into being more than 40 years ago under the guidance of the late Frederic Cassidy, Hall will talk about how forensic linguists, physicians and psychiatrists are using the dictionary.

Despite long-standing fears that first broadcast, then cable and now the Internet would wipe out colorful regional speech, it’s holdings its own and pronunciation differences are actually increasing from coast to coast, Hall says.

“There are thousands of differences in words, phrases, grammatical constructions and pronunciations, which both set the various regions apart from the others and bind their speakers to one another,” she says.

For example, moving from East Coast to West:

• Skeevy, used only in the past 30 years, especially in New York. It means “disgusting, sleazy, disreputable,” and comes from the Italian schifare, “to disgust.”
• Runza, Nebraska’s answer to the Cornish pasty. This word, now trademarked, comes from the German ranzen, a satchel. Nowadays it is pocket bread stuffed with ground beef, cabbage, onions and spices.
• Pogonip, Nevada’s term for dense, icy fog.
• Pennywinkle, a caddis fly larva used as fishing bait in the Pacific Northwest.

DARE, which already has published four volumes, preserves America’s language idiosyncrasies from colonial times to the present. Its final volume, SK-Z, will be finished in 2009.

For more information about DARE, visit http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/dare.html.