1165. Today, we talk with Joan Houston Hall to look at the monumental task of documenting how Americans speak. We look at the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), exploring the unique folk words that survive outside of standard dictionaries and how "word wagons" traveled the country to map the "egg turners," "pogonips," and "oncers" that define our regional identities.
1165. Today, we talk with Joan Houston Hall to look at the monumental task of documenting how Americans speak. We look at the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), exploring the unique folk words that survive outside of standard dictionaries and how "word wagons" traveled the country to map the "egg turners," "pogonips," and "oncers" that define our regional identities.
"Dictionary of American Regional English" (DARE)
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Joan Houston Hall, former president of the American Dialect Society, former president of the Dictionary Society of North America, and longtime editor of the "Dictionary of American Regional English," better known as "DARE." And that's what we're going to talk about today. Joan, welcome to the "Grammar Girl" podcast.
Joan Hall: Well, thank you very much.
Mignon Fogarty: You bet. I am so excited to have you here because "DARE" is just one of the funnest—you know, my listeners might not like me saying "funnest," but I think it's one of the funnest dictionary projects out there, one of the funnest language projects. Can you tell people sort of what kinds of words go into "DARE"?
Joan Hall: Well, we consider a word to be regional if it is in some place in the US—whether that's a tiny portion of a state, even part of a city, a region of several states, or most of the country, but not everywhere. We also consider things to be regional if they are what we call "folk." That is, things that you wouldn't find in standard dictionaries, but people use just in their everyday lives. So, a lot of those are the particularly fun words. And I agree, it's the funnest dictionary around.
Mignon Fogarty: And does it include slang?
Joan Hall: We try not to include slang because, by definition, slang is very ephemeral. Your teenage kids use it, and then all of a sudden their ten-year-old sibling uses it; they stop because it's an in-group kind of thing, and it lets you know what group you're part of. But when others start budging in on it, then no longer is it functioning as it should.
Mignon Fogarty: So these words are regional, but durable as well, then.
Joan Hall: Yes. Durable is a little bit hard to define in this case because sometimes we have a single quotation for an entry, and in that case, with only one quotation, we call it a "oncer." And to indicate that in the text, we put a vertical bar with two horizontal bars on it. And what that means is that we think that this is probably widely used in the community, but at the same time, we know that people have family words. Sometimes they make up words; sometimes they simply misspeak. So we put that warning sign by our "oncers," and I'm really pleased to say that very often, though we've put a "oncer" sign on it, later we find corroborating evidence and that helps justify our sprachgefühl—that is, our language feeling that we thought this probably was a legitimate entry.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, that's wonderful. You know, and it goes the other way around too, because, you know, we do "familect" at the end of the Tuesday show for the podcast, of family dialect stories. And I've had more than one person call in and say that they have a word that is their familect. They think they're the only one that uses it, the only family that uses it, and when I look into it, I find out it's regional. So, like, I think "redd up" is an example that I think is in "DARE"? Yeah. And someone thought that was their family word. They thought only their family used it, because I think they lived in a region where it wasn't common.
Joan Hall: Oh, a little family travel maybe, or historical, ancestors from Scotland, perhaps.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And so I also—I want to get right to the words because there are so many wonderful words. And I'm laughing because there are not many things as a writer that are physically demanding, but moving around this book is actually—I'm afraid it's going to kill me. It's so heavy. So, I have Volume II of the "Dictionary of American Regional English."
It is six volumes. It's a very thick book. People on YouTube can see, and it has these wonderful maps. And so I'm going to try to hold this up. This is the map for "egg turner." Egg turner is a regional word in here. And I also have—I have my own little family story because I brought "show and tell" as well. My family calls both of these things a spatula. One of them is something you use to flip pancakes or eggs, and the other one is a thing you use to scrape the side of a mixing bowl. And my husband and I were in the kitchen one day and I said, "Hand me the spatula," and he said, "Which one?" And we realized we don't have separate words for these two things, but the rest of the world clearly does.
Joan Hall: I don't.
Mignon Fogarty: No, you too?
Joan Hall: Right. I call them both spatulas.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, but there were so many—so in here, we have "egg turner," which is just so descriptive. What else? There were some other ones. So we had "egg turner," "flipper"—that's fun, I may have heard someone call it a flipper—"lifter," and "cake turner." Because, of course, there are words for that so you can distinguish between the two gadgets.
Joan Hall: Yeah, I don't think of other synonyms for them, though, for the bowl scraper.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, the only one—I looked it up and the only one I found—well, there's "rubber scraper," and then there are other words in foreign languages. So in Dutch, it is apparently "pannenlikker." So...
Joan Hall: Ugh.
Mignon Fogarty: There are a number of words that play on the word "licker." Not surprisingly to me—not the idea that you lick the spatula, but because the spatula licks the bowl clean.
Joan Hall: Oh, nice concept.
Mignon Fogarty: But we have, you know—I held it up. The people on YouTube will be able to see, but the maps are really interesting in "DARE." They're recognizable as the map of the United States, but as I'm looking at it, I'm thinking, "Well, it's also a little off." And then, like, what happened to Florida?
Joan Hall: Yes, it is a very strange-looking map, and the reason is that it's based on population density of the country as of the 1960 census, and that was a long time ago. But as you say, the shapes are recognizable. But if you look, for instance, at Connecticut, which is up in the Northeast and which we know is a pretty small state, we also know that Connecticut is very densely populated.
What we had to do was make Connecticut bigger in order to account for the large number of people. But New Mexico, for instance, is a very large state in terms of square miles, but it's sparsely populated, so that on our map had to be shrunk to a little sliver. So it shows where most of the people live in this country, or did back then. And what that means is that if you have blank spots on the map, it's because people don't use the particular word; it's not because there aren't any people there.
Mignon Fogarty: So the dots on the map show where that particular word is used in the country. And yeah, I mean, New York is obviously bigger on this map than it is on the regular map that shows it by geographic size.
Joan Hall: Yes.
Mignon Fogarty: Interesting. Yeah, it's a funky map.
Joan Hall: It takes a little getting used to, but once you've looked at it a few times, you can see what the states are and you can just see general patterns of dots.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, let's talk about the regions because, you know, some of them overlap when you're describing a word in the dictionary, but you sort of break the country down into these linguistic regions. So can you talk about maybe the big ones and what the differences are?
Joan Hall: Yes, there are several that are very common and distinct, and you won't be surprised to know that New England is one, or that the Northeast in general is one, and that the South is another: the South Atlantic, the Gulf South. When you get further west, the regions are less distinct and they do certainly overlap.
For instance, what we call "Inland North"—the north part of the country west of New England—overlaps with the "North Central," and then as you get to the West, the Rocky Mountains sometimes overlap with the plains states and the Pacific Northwest sometimes has Rocky Mountain states. So it's a little bit trickier. And very often our regional labels don't just say "South" or "New England" or "Pennsylvania"; there are usually dots that are a little bit outside of the basic pattern. So we say "chiefly New England, but scattered elsewhere," or "chiefly South Midland," whatever the dots show.
Mignon Fogarty: "Dragonfly" is another really fun word. I had no idea there are so many names for the dragonfly. There are 77 synonyms for the dragonfly in here.
Joan Hall: Yes, those words are really wonderful because they give a snapshot of historical folklore and superstitions about what this little creature does to people.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, "ear-cutter" was one that was particularly frightening that jumped out at me.
Joan Hall: And "ear-sewer."
Mignon Fogarty: Oh yeah.
Joan Hall: ...attacking children's ears.
Mignon Fogarty: Yes. And, oh gosh... you have the list right there.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Another one that I loved was called a "darning needle" because it flits back and forth over the same spot, like a darning needle going over a hole in the sock. "Helicopter"—that was, you know, pretty descriptive, maybe not too exciting. But yeah, and I noticed on the map or the entry for dragonfly, it had a code. It had "INF" and then "NH 18." And I was wondering, does that mean New Hampshire? What does that mean?
Joan Hall: The "INF" refers to the specific person, the informant who was interviewed and answered that particular question. So yes, it was informant New Hampshire 14.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow. Wow. And so that's a great lead-in to talk about how this information was gathered.
Joan Hall: Yeah, it was a very massive fieldwork project where, first, the communities were selected—1001 communities because Fred Cassidy, who was responsible for this, said, "Well, you know, we will try to get a thousand communities, but we might miss a couple, so let's do 1,002." But they all worked out. They were chosen to reflect the population densities across the country, and field workers—that is, usually graduate students, sometimes faculty members—were assigned particular communities and they had to go there knowing no one, find people who had lived there all their lives, who would be willing to answer their questions. In this huge questionnaire, there were 1,600 and some questions.
Mignon Fogarty: My gosh.
Joan Hall: So finding someone who had lived there all their lives who was willing to answer that number of questions was often just impossible. So the field worker would have to find two or three, sometimes even four or five people who would be willing to split up the questionnaire. They might say, "Well, I can talk about family and household things, but talk to Mr. Jones down the road about hunting and fishing," that kind of thing.
So in each case, we knew the details about age, sex, race, amount of education, and community type, which meant that in addition to showing where these people were on the map, we could also analyze the social characteristics. So in addition to saying, "This is chiefly New England," we could also say, "Especially among older people, i.e., over 60," or "Especially among women," or "Particularly among people with little formal education." So it's a social analysis as well as a regional one.
Mignon Fogarty: So they spread out across the country in these "word wagons." Where—how? I just—I'm trying to imagine where you would even begin when you arrive in a town. Like, did they tend to go to the library or the grocery store, or where did people find the most success trying to find people?
Joan Hall: Well, it varied by part of the country. One of our best field workers was sent to the South. He was from Arkansas, so he had a sort of Midland dialect, which wasn't as unusual in the South as it would've been if the field worker had been from Wisconsin. But he learned, because this was during the Vietnam War and there was a lot of social agitation about different opinions on the war, he knew that going there with this green word wagon saying "University of Wisconsin" on the side could rile some people up. So his idea was to go first to the sheriff, tell him what he was doing and explain it, and get some credibility behind his presence. That helped a lot.
And often the sheriff himself or herself could suggest people who were longtime residents and who might be willing to help. It turned out that librarians were not always the best people because they would tend to say, "Oh, Mrs. So-and-so is so well-educated and she knows all the words; go talk to her." But that's not what we wanted. We wanted the local words, not the educated words. So field workers developed their own techniques, and often they found that nursing homes were good places—not only because people were old and had use of words that were used decades earlier, but also because they had more time.
Mignon Fogarty: Mm-hmm. That makes sense. Did you go out in the field yourself?
Joan Hall: I didn't for "DARE," but I did for another project called the "Dialect Survey of Rural Georgia." It was a different survey but used the same kinds of techniques.
Mignon Fogarty: Mm-hmm. So for "DARE," they also looked at pronunciation as well as different words too, right?
Joan Hall: Oh yes, definitely. And to get pronunciations, field workers would write transcriptions sometimes, but a better source was recordings. And this is hard to believe, but in 1965, there were people who were afraid of tape recorders, had never heard their own voices, and were extremely reluctant to do this. A few people just said, "No, I'm not going to." But most people ultimately realized that this could be fun and agreed to do two things. One was to read a silly little story called "Arthur the Rat," that was developed to elicit all of the important contrasts in vowels and consonants in American English. So, if we had these recordings from the whole country, we could systematically compare pronunciations across the whole United States, and that was very valuable. But at the same time, the field workers asked people to just talk about anything that interested them, and that way we got a good conversational sample as well.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Joan Hall: It turned out to be...
Mignon Fogarty: Let's hear a recording of some of the "Arthur the Rat" stories. And then you looked at individual pronunciations as well, right?
Joan Hall: Yes. Mm-hmm. And using those transcriptions, some of which came from the actual recordings, we could make maps of pronunciations as well as of lexical items.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, one of the words that I noticed in my Volume II was "evening," but it was pronounced differently, like "evenin'." And so not only was it surprising to me that "evening" in some part of the country—I think I failed to write it down—but it—anytime after noon could be considered evening. So, you know, if someone once said, "I'm going to come over this evening," in a different part of the country from where I live, they might show up at 1:00 PM, which would be a big surprise to me.
Joan Hall: Well, I had that very same experience doing fieldwork in Georgia. I was interviewing a woman in the morning and it got to be noon, and she said, "I'm sorry, I'm going to have to break this up because I have plans to meet someone for lunch, so please come back this evening." And I—my heart just fell because I wanted to get on the road to get back to Atlanta before the traffic.
So I cooled my heels till about 4:30, which was the earliest I could consider evening. I went back and she was terribly distressed because she thought I had left, because for her, "evening" was at about one o'clock.
Mignon Fogarty: Just right after lunch.
Joan Hall: That was one of my first lessons in regional differences.
Mignon Fogarty: I love it. Well, we have a fun story of a woman from New York who was recorded telling a story about being caught up in some bootlegging.Â
Mignon Fogarty: And so these wonderful pronunciations, you know, sort of lead me into thinking about who is using "DARE," the "Dictionary of American Regional English." How are these pronunciations, you know, helping your readers and users?
Joan Hall: Well, I would say that probably it's the lexical items more than the pronunciations that have been particularly useful, but it has really surprised us that "DARE" can be extremely useful to physicians. So I had a letter from a man who said he had grown up in New England, gone to medical school in Maine, and his first position was in western Pennsylvania. One of his first patients said, "Doc, I've been rifting and I got jags in my leaders."
Mignon Fogarty: Oh dear.
Joan Hall: He had no idea! But it turns out that because this was western Pennsylvania, which is heavily settled by Scots, "rifting" in Scottish means to belch or burp, and to have "jags in his leaders" meant to have pains in the tendons in his neck. So he'd been burping too much and it hurt the tendons in his neck.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing. So the doctor looked that up in "DARE" and figured out what his patient was talking about.
Joan Hall: Well, unfortunately "DARE" wasn't ready then.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh.
Joan Hall: He couldn't, but he ultimately learned and told us about his experience.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing.
Joan Hall: It's true of any physician who grows up in one area and then finds himself or herself someplace very different. So what would you do if your patient said, "Doc, I've got the ground itch, I've got dew poison, I've got salt rheum, leaders, pones, kernels"?
Mignon Fogarty: Oh no. What are they?
Joan Hall: Well, if this doctor had "DARE," you're right, he or she could go look it up and then know what questions to ask. Both ground itch and dew poison are skin irritations or inflammations or cracks, based on the idea that if you go out in the morning where there's still dew on the grass and you're in your bare feet, you can get various kinds of critters or infections.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, how interesting. Yeah, some that jumped out at me that I thought might be interesting to a doctor were that, you know, so many of these—I would never guess what the meaning is. So "to fall off" or "fall-off" is to lose weight in the South and, I think, the Southern Midland region. I never would've guessed; you said, "Oh, she's fallen off recently," I never would think that was losing weight. And then "fall out" can be to burst out laughing, but it can also be to lose consciousness. So if you say someone fell out, you know, I might think they fell out of a car or something, but no, it means they passed out.
Joan Hall: Yeah. Yeah. And these kinds of things are just great illustrations of how regionalisms still survive. It doesn't make sense to say that the US has become homogenized in terms of its language. That's something people like to say. They say, "Oh, we all use the internet, we watch the same podcasts and television shows, so we all sound the same." But no, there are still many differences. And it's funny to realize that things we say naturally aren't always understood by other people.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. So surprising. And another one that I don't think I would've guessed, maybe in retrospect this makes more sense, but a "French harp" is a harmonica.
Joan Hall: Yes, we have a really interesting—also a medical story—about that. We got a phone call from a psychiatrist in Chicago who wondered what we could tell him about the words "Tom Walkers," "harp," and "mouth organ." It turns out that we had a great map for Tom Walkers, which are stilts. Both harp and mouth organ are regional terms for their harmonica.
Well, it turns out that there's a book called the "Boston Naming Test," and it's used to try to diagnose aphasia or a disease where people can't come up with names for things, and so they have all these pictures of items and the patients are supposed to give a name to them. Well, the people who made that book had no idea about regional English, and so if a person said stilts were "Tommy Walkers," they were marked wrong. If they called a harmonica a "mouth organ" or a "harp," they were marked wrong.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh.
Joan Hall: So people were just misdiagnosed all over the place by the fact that the makers of the test didn't accept any other terms.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Joan Hall: It was particularly interesting to find that this test was used in the US Army. Where can you get a more diverse population than the US Army? When we discovered that it was being used in this way, we tried to get in touch with the people who made the test and let them know that we could help them. At first they seemed interested, but later every attempt to reach them was just rejected. I don't believe the test has ever been updated to acknowledge regional variation.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, that's terrible. People might be diagnosed as having dementia because they're using regionalisms. That’s terrible.Â
Joan Hall: Yeah, it's really horrible.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, well, you know, the French harp may—I was surprised. I—you know, then I thought, "Well, maybe I was surprised that it wasn't more localized around regions with French influence, like maybe New Orleans, also known for its music." But it did remind me that, you know, so many of the words we use are influenced by the early settlers in the regions. So what are some examples of that?
Joan Hall: Oh, well many of them are food terms that reflect the immigrants who came to a particular region. In the Upper Midwest, it's particularly fun to realize how many different ethnic populations came here. So, for instance, if you ask about local foods, or "What desserts do people eat here? What do you call a dish made of cabbage?" and that kind of thing, you find that in the Upper Midwest, it's full of things like "kringle" and "krut" and "paczki" and "kielbasa" and lots of German and Norwegian and Polish and Swedish and other terms, just reflecting the large numbers of immigrants.
If you go elsewhere, you might find words from Native American languages. And that's true of one you just mentioned earlier, which is the "pogonip," a very dense fog that makes it practically impossible to see if you're driving through the mountains. And that comes from, I think it's Paiute.
Mignon Fogarty: Mm-hmm. That one jumped out at me too because it's—so I went to school at UC Santa Cruz, and there's an open space park called Pogonip. And so I always assumed it was from sort of Northern California, but I also lived in Nevada, which is supposedly where that term is from—the fog that they get in parts of Nevada. But I never heard it when I lived in Nevada.
And so, and this happens to me when I post about regionalisms online sometimes, there will always be someone who says, you know, if I'm posting about something that's, I don't know, common in the South, they'll be like, "Well, I live in the South and I never heard that word." And then there'll be someone who's from Seattle and they'll be like, "Well, I live in Seattle and my family uses that word all the time." And so I imagine you run up against that too. Like, what do you tell people?
Joan Hall: Well, that language changes and that sometimes there's kind of a divergent evolution or convergent evolution. It just happens.Â
Mignon Fogarty: And people move.Â
Joan Hall: Yes, definitely.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, you know, I found two websites for "DARE." Can you tell me which—and one seemed—I mean, I know the project has slowed down, but is still being updated, and one of the websites did have like a late 2025 update. Can you talk maybe about the current status of the project and explain maybe the two different websites?
Joan Hall: Yes. As you might guess, finding funding for this project was a very difficult part of the whole process, and by the time we had actually published the last version and the digital edition, it was clear that funders were saying, "We got you this far, but we just cannot help you any further." So funding eventually just trickled off to nothing.
And my successor as Chief Editor, George Goebel, was not willing to let it go. He knew that we needed to keep going and updating things. So, as a volunteer, he has been doing what we call "quarterly updates." And he has been concentrating on Volume I because that was published in 1985, and that was before we had any digital resources. So to go back and use all that's available now and update those entries was really important. Sometimes he could find quotes that antedated our earliest one by a hundred years.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Joan Hall: So he has been doing that four times a year. I read them and we talk about them, and then he posts them on the "DARE" website. And Harvard Press is going to be incorporating those into the digital edition on an annual basis. So they are actually on the "DARE" website, which is dare.wisc.edu. And in the digital edition, it's called daredictionary.com. And that is Harvard Press's digital edition. And unfortunately, it's not free.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Joan Hall: And not as many libraries as we had hoped subscribed to it. It's possible to get a personal copy for $50 a year. But we're sorry that it's that much because I know that seems like a lot.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, but when you think of them—people are volunteering their time to keep it going. I mean, that's heroic, but it also should not have to be that way. Yeah. And so, yeah, so you can get a personal subscription for $49 a year or, you know, you could ask your library to get an institutional subscription too, and you could access it that way. I like having the book; it's nice. But the digital version gives you access to all those recordings, which, you know, is wonderful to be able to click on some of the references and hear the recordings of the people saying the sentences that have the words in them.
Joan Hall: Yeah, makes it come alive.
Mignon Fogarty: It really does. Well, Joan, thank you so much for being here. It's a delight to talk to you about "DARE," the "Dictionary of American Regional English."
Joan Hall: Well, it's been my pleasure. Thank you.
Mignon Fogarty: You bet. And for our Grammarpaloozians, we're going to have a bonus segment where I'm going to ask Joan about some of her personal favorite words, how she got started with "DARE" and language research in general. And if you would like to access that bonus material, you can sign up at patreon.com/grammargirl. That's all. Thanks for listening.