Beyond Words

[Dave Monroe]

>From Mark Johnson, "Beyond Words: Mapping the
Backroads of American Speech," The Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel, Sunday, October 13th, 2001 ...

"... the epic tale of the Dictionary of American
Regional English. Conceived more than a century ago as
a sweeping study of the different words spoken in
different areas of the country, the dictionary was
finally launched in 1963, and now, 38 years later, the
authors are midway through the letter 'S.'
   "If all goes according to plan, the volume
containing the final entry for the letter 'Z' will be
published sometime in 2007. One more volume will
follow, listing the responses from exhaustive
interviews on regional speech with 2,777 Americans in
more than 1,000 communities across the country.

[...]

   "A national self-portrait is emerging from the
dictionary's uncompromising look at American speech,
from the beautiful to the ugly, from the 79 different
regional terms for 'dragonfly' to the 13 pages of
entries concerning the word 'nigger.'
   "'It's not simply a word list,' Zwilling says.
'This is a picture of the American national character.
If you look at it intelligently, you can glean a hell
of a lot about what it is to be American and what has
made us what we are.'
   "Although the fieldwork is now more than three
decades old, some believe the dictionary will still
counter the notion that America has become homogenous,
a nation of McDonald's hamburgers in every town and
uniform speech that sounds like the evening news from
New York."

http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/oct01/dictionary.asp

http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/oct01/dare14101301a.asp

And take a listen to ...

http://media.onwisconsin.com/news/woman101001.ram

The DARE homepage is at ...

http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/dare.html

And take a look at, e.g., ...

http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/anatomy.htm

An extensive and fascinating article.  For once. 
Every so often, there's actually something interesting
in the ol' Urinal Sentinel ...

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals.
http://personals.yahoo.com