What's in a word? Mapping America's regional vocabulary and the Linguistic Atlas Project, with Allison Burkette

Mapping Regional Speech

0:00Hi, I'm Valerie Friedland, and I'm filling in for Mignon this week. And with me on the show today, I'm talking with Allison Burkett, 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

0:33least, she's the author of Dialectology and the Linguistic Atlas Project. Allison, welcome to the show today. Hey, thanks so much, Valerie. I'm really happy to be here. 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, really useful on my own. But for those that are not linguists, what exactly is a linguistic atlas? Well, a linguistic atlas is a collection, you know, 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

1:09interaction or the same sort of social situation. And so, for instance, we want to know the difference between, I don't know, northern speech and southern speech and whether they say pop or soda or Coke. I think that's probably the most sort of commonly understood example. But this is actually something that we study, you know, on a scientific level. Right. And of course, everybody knows it's actually Coke. Just getting down there as a southerner. Yes, it is. For everybody else, it might be pop or soda,

1:40but the OG is Coke. Right. And I remember growing up, you know, we did things in a skillet and some other people called 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? Yeah. Yeah. Those are great examples. Okay. So, you know, 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

2:13all these new different things that we have than maybe what they did 50, 75 years ago? 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. 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 like the same set of vocabulary, but just looking at how,

2:45I don't know, I don't know, the way that people use that vocabulary changes over time. And so sometimes, yeah, 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

3:21of 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, you know, 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, you know, whatever it is. And that's something that's kind of very regional, the way that that particular question is answered.

3:57Right. And especially being full as a tick, I can imagine, you know, we don't really have ticks where I live. So no one would say that. Yeah, where I grew up, they say it all the time. Exactly, exactly. And I've seen a full tick, and they are pretty full. Yes, it is kind of a gross thing to say at the dinner table, frankly. 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. Exactly, exactly.

Starting a Fire with Kindling

4:25Okay, 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 would we use to start fire. So how would you ask that question? And then what are the options? And what does it tell us? Well, you should have been an Atlas interviewer, because you did a great job

4:58of asking the question. And right, 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, 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

5:32Yeah, 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. They could then be collected and used as kindling.

6:08Interesting. 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. 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,

6:38I guess, kind of kissing cousins. And a lot of the terms overlap from 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, 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

7:11landscape 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

7:42America. 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, it's really cool. That's right. And one of the other things

Uncovering Culture Through Vocabulary

8:07that'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. I just want to make that clear. You were not doing that original Atlas. You were not doing this original Atlas work, which is unfortunate. I'd like to go back in time and, you know, 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 a hundred years ago, I think a very valid

8:37question would be who cares? Like what, what difference does it make? What somebody was saying a hundred 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

9:11like 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. It's never just about the vocabulary. It's always about the things that that vocabulary is tied to. 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 the sort of photos are images

9:49of 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.

Shifting Practices and New Meanings

10:09You know, kindling is a great example of that because, you know, if somebody asked me when I was younger, like, how do you make a fire, depending on what kind of house you live in, you'd be like, well, I flick on a light switch and the fire just comes off. That is how I start a fire. So when some of these like 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

10:45wide 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? So the dating app. And so again, that's something tied to that meaning of trying to get something started,

11:17trying to, trying to create a spark. 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, you know, like you were saying that 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, you know, the death of words, I think, is usually wildly exaggerated. I mean, words rarely, rarely just completely go away. It happens, but not

11:54as 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, you know, like Sarah Lee, or Marie Callender, or whatever their preferred pie was, but couldn't necessarily come up with a name like

12:27cobbler, or, you know, a crumble, or like all of these other things, a pan dowdy. I mean, there are just there are so many terms, actually, for for cobbler historically. But because our practices have changed, the number that's part of our daily vocabulary has dwindled. 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, you know, crisp, which to me, when I heard that term, because someone used it in reference to something that

13:00looked 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 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 is that cobbler is a great example of that. And now you're

13:31making me hungry. I know, I know. Because one of the one of the Atlas questions certainly was about the deep dish pie. And the people, the speakers from New England, use the terms dumpling and pudding. And again, if you remember that this was almost 100 years ago, you can you 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

14:05came 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. 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, you know, both in the way that they spoke, but you know, in terms of sounds,

14:37but also here we see in terms of the vocabulary they kept. I just I love that. And so I now going back to Tinder, I think one of the funny things when I was reading your article where you mentioned that it's related, you know, Kinling's relationship to Kindle and Tinder is it's true that here we've repurposed those words in these really novel contexts, right? This very technologically advanced kind of reader is, you know, start sparking, sparking a fire. And then Tinder, which is a dating app, you know, to spark a fire romantically. And it's so interesting, because I would bet a lot of people

15:10don'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 you know, yes, yeah, I it was such a revelation, because I thought, well, so obvious once you think about it. But it was really it was a fun, little fun fact to discover in your article. Yeah, and I've got to tell you, it's a it's a fun fact that I ran across when I started looking at, you know, the groups of words that the Atlas had for Kindling, because it didn't occur to me either, until I saw it. You know, I'm like, Oh, hey,

15:41that's okay. I know what that is. Right. So next time you're on Tinder, right? Think about how you're starting that fire. That's right. That's right.

Regional Furniture Names

15:57So let's 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 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,

16:28we 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 and names that you have found, because I think that's a really fun area. Yeah. And anybody that knows me knows I'm obsessed with Chester drawers. And I grew up calling, you know, 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,

17:02hey, 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, you've got, I think most people probably say dresser now. And then you've got people like me that still say Chester 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, or which is a chest of drawers. It is, it does. And you could

17:33tell that's like such a Charlson word. It is. It's just a very, because they stayed in contact with French, you know, sort of longer than other colonial areas. So like chiffonier and somonier were, were found, like within the speakers of that, of that particular area around the Charleston area. 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 chiffonier. So it's, and that's a very

18:06New 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, you know, 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

18:41variation that we see in what people call these pieces of furniture. It's hard to nail down sometimes whether, 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, sold antiques. So I spent my childhood on the weekend in antique stores

19:11being told not to touch things, right? So I was always, you know, 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 high boy, which is another kind of chest of drawers and a chest of drawers, because a high boy 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

19:48placemats or that kind of thing, sort of dining storage. Whereas again, chest of drawers would be in a bedroom. But point is, I have, 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

20:20of furniture in their bedroom. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Right. I definitely don't have the vocabulary you did, because I grew up in that sort of antithesis of the households 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 might, you could tell me better than I would know. It sounds to me like it would be Southern because that's where I grew up. Is that more widespread? I grew up in the South too, but it was actually pretty widespread.

20:52Yeah. 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, it's interesting when you said shiffle robe and you're talking about, you know, 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 going to always, I'm going to sound very, very smart whenever I go to a hotel and put my clothes in the shiffle robe.

21:25And the interesting thing is, it's 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, you know, it didn't get separated out to being a separate movable piece of furniture until later because originally it was closet. Oh, that's interesting. When you probably just started getting more stuff and needed more room, you know, 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,

21:57but 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 egg corn because it's like mishearing something. So if for the word acorn 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 reanalyze it as all intensive purposes. So Chester drawers is an example of that. Have you found other things like

22:31that, that just because they're handed down and people just kind of mishear them that they, they sort of just make a new word up? I certainly have a ton of anecdotal evidence of that happening, but it's, 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, to use a term that's particular either to them or their family or their really specific

23:05neighborhood or community. So sort of like a familect kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of like a familect. So have you heard, have you met other people that say Chester drawers? Oh, is that a, a Burkett family? Nope. Nope. It's all over the Atlas. So that's more widespread. 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 a chest of drawers, but then there's another one further down. It's just Chester drawers. And there's some people who just call it Chester. I love that. That's pretty

23:39funny. One of the things that you also just talking about these objects, like whether, you know, you have an object that's a Shifa robe in your house and how that would inspire you to talk about your experiences. How do these atlases work in terms of, you know, getting people to tell you these stories that give you words that you wouldn't, I mean, cause this is not like something in casual conversation. Hey, how you doing? Shifa robe. 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

24:11helps get these, these aspects that you're looking at and these words you're looking at out?

The Early Atlas Interviews

24:17Yeah, 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 are 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, well, this is 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 just the, not the entire interview because the interviews were six to eight

24:52hours long. It's that many questions. Holy moly. 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 the early ones, we just have written answers. And so the field workers would go to a town and most of the field workers, 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

25:28or postmistress, or they would ask the town librarian. 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 say, hi, we're doing this. We're trying to explain the project. We're doing this investigation of the way that dialects differ from region to region.

26:02You 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

26:35lunch? 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 would, they could point to an object and say, what do you call this piece of furniture? What is this that I'm sitting in? You know, what are, what are you sitting on? Is that a, you know, and not, they try not to say sofa couch, but what do you, what do you call that piece of furniture? That's

27:07upholstered that you're sitting on. And then they would record the answers in international phonetic alphabets. So we get a sense of at least the pronunciation of the answers to the questions in addition to what the actual term was. 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, a hundred years was this sound pronounced the same as it is today. So it was

27:40very lucky for us. And we hope that those field workers knew what they were doing. Well, they were, they were trained within an inch of their lives. So they, they knew what they were doing. Right. And they, they earned a living doing this, right? I mean, this was paid work. Yes. Because I think you, you know, you, 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

28:11these people had. And usually were they students or? Most of these people, they were the actual professors. Yes. I mean, these interviews have been ongoing since basically 1931. And the ones that were done in like the 1970s and the 1980s and 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 eighties were tape recorded. And so there's not the same kind

28:46of pressure to like really train someone how to use international phonetic alphabet the way that there was back in the beginning. Right. 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's just, 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, that we have these records. I mean, we're incredibly lucky that we're people interested in these questions a hundred years ago so that we preserve some of

29:19our history because these, they don't die, but when you follow the 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, the app that you're using, it doesn't tell you anything about a hundred years ago, what, you know, the difference in the landscape or the physical environment or the experiences that these are, you know, people had that brought us those words. So having those records is super important. It's been so much fun talking to you, Alison. 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

29:54obviously the ones that we've talked about? Is there something that you're like, oh my gosh, this is

Variations of Cornbread

29:58the coolest word in history and variations? I'm just curious. You know, I do. I absolutely love the terms for cornbread because they ask people, they're like, what do you call bread that's made out of cornmeal? And it's a simple enough question, right? Cornbread is the, was the most common answer. However, there were over 380 different, like unique, different terms for cornbread. If you

30:29look at the data, like basically down the East coast of the United States. So everything from Johnny cakes, which is very Northern to a 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, when he asked people about cornbread and they were like, what do you call

31:01breadmeal, cornmeal, cornbread? He's 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 it was back then relatively common answer to the cornbread question, but he got a lot of information just by making these like little adjustment, you know, just by asking people for particular detail. Well, what do you call

31:32it 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 a, such a thing as hoecakes, as far as I can tell really did. Cause 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

32:07middle of a field, like building a little fire, putting your hoe in it, and then putting batter on that hoe to make a hoe cake in the field. I'm sure that was very sanitary. I'm sure it was delicious. Just for people. Speaking of farm implements, people may not know, right? A hoe is sort of like a pitchfork, correct? No, a hoe's got the flat. It's more like a shovel. A shovel. Okay. See, I'm a perfect example of someone who has never worked on a farm. So yeah, so that you'd make that in the heat. And yeah, you know, it's funny because Johnny cake and corn

32:38cakes, I think a lot of people think of Johnny cakes 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, if I might, I might be wrong there, but I believe that it is one of these early, like, you know how Thomas Jefferson was a very, very wordy. He was a wordsmith, but we actually had a lot of the early founding fathers

33:10that 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 Johnny cakes. That's one of his first written citations, but don't quote me on that. I'm not the specialist on this. I learned something today too. I will check that out. 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? They can find us at linguisticatlasproject.org. And if for some reason you have

33:42someone 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, they can poke around in datasets. 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. Oh, well, I definitely want to

34:14know 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. Well, thank you so much for having me.