Word wagons and bobbasheelys: Life at DARE, with Joan Houston Hall

Interview with Joan Houston Hall

0:00Grammar Girl here. I talked with Joan Houston Hall, the longtime editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, back in March for the Grammar Pelusians, and she told me about the word wagons that crossed the country collecting oral histories and the detective trail she followed to track down regional words like scrid and babashili. I think you'll love it. Greetings, Grammar Pelusians. I'm here today with Joan Houston Hall, longtime editor of

0:34D.A.R.E., the Dictionary of American Regional English, also former president of the American Dialect Society and former president of the Dictionary Society of North America, a true woman of words. Joan, thank you so much for being here. Oh, it's my pleasure. You bet. So in the main segment, we've already talked about some of my favorite words. But you know, Ashley, before we get to more words, I would love to hear how you got started because I read that it was because you couldn't get into the classes you wanted.

1:07Well, actually, that's true. When I tried to register at Emory University in my first year grad school, I ended up in a history of the English language course because a different one that I had wanted was full. And the professor named Lee Pedersen in this course said, well, you're going to be writing a paper on Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. But if you don't want to write one on Modern English, you can help me do interviews in rural Georgia. So I thought, hey, I have 10 papers anyway this quarter. I'll do some interviews. And

1:43it was a really fun experience. What were some of your favorite times out doing those interviews? Oh, well, I mentioned in the earlier part of the podcast talking with a woman who asked me to come back in the evening and finding out that she meant one o'clock or I meant 430. But another one was when I was interviewing an elderly African-American man. He was 100, I believe. It was very unusual

2:13because he had a large farm and had been a very prosperous farmer. And it was also very widely read. And it turns out that was because his grandmother had been blind and it was his job to read to read to her. So I was sitting on the front porch with him asking, what do you call the shelf over a fireplace? What do you call this or that? And he was answering them all very patiently and kindly. And I thought of myself as this professional field worker. And he leaned over and he said,

2:51what's a little, little girl like you doing so far from a mama? And what did you say? I said, oh, my husband's out there in the car.

3:07I was a little flummoxed.

3:11And the interviews are the most important part of the dictionary, but you also drew on

Collecting quotes for historical records

3:18published, like written sources as well, didn't you? Yes, we did. It's a historical dictionary. And that means we try to include a quotation with the very earliest instance of each sense or word that we can find, plus enough others to show the history of the word. And sometimes that will be not a very long period, but other times it will be right up to the year just for publication. So it's as broad a history of the word as we can provide. And that

3:51just works alongside the fieldwork that we collected. And what's the yearly range from when you started collecting to sort of the end of the big part of the project? We started the fieldwork in 1965, and that went through 1970. But at the same time that the fieldworkers were out there doing their work, other people were collecting quotations from newspapers, magazines, novels, histories, poems, all sorts of written materials. So we tried to get as

4:26good a selection of written materials as we could. But as the volumes were published over a period of 30 years, of course, the options for finding quotations, given our digital materials now, just expanded tremendously. So in the later volumes, there's much more documentation than there was in the earlier volumes. Is there an archive, a scriptorium, like they have at the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster?

5:00Well, all of our materials are now in the University of Wisconsin archives. So everything can be found. And I spent the years after my retirement, making a very detailed index of everything, some 400 or so boxes of materials that we sent to the archives. And one of the really useful things is that Fred Cassidy was a correspondent with practically every

5:30linguist in the country over his many, many, many years in the field. So if you're researching the works of a particular scholar and want to find correspondence, you're likely to find it in the DARE archives. Oh, I wouldn't have thought of that. Interesting. So if somebody wants to sort of begin experiencing DARE, I mean, of course, they can start on the website. And it's not free, but there are 100 sample words. So you can get a feeling for what it has before you subscribe. But what would sort of

6:06be the next step that you would recommend for someone who wants to dig deeper? Well, one of the really fun parts of the DARE website, the dare.wisc.edu, is that we include all of our newsletters. And particularly in the early ones, we have a feature called fieldworker reminiscences. And the fieldworkers, who at that point had been 30 or 40 years away from their experiences, were reminiscing. And since many of them had kept diaries, they had good sources of

6:42anecdotes and their stories about what it was like, either to work from a word wagon or just from their own car. They're amazing. So that's a very fun place to start, just to get a feel for how this was done. There are lots of other parts of the DARE website that illustrate particular parts of the process. And there's a link to a place at the University of Wisconsin's Memorial Library, where the

7:15complete audio recordings of all of our informants are available for use. So you can choose a place, you can choose a topic, you can choose whatever you want from the index there, and hear people from 1965 to 70. My imagination is just running wild right now. I'm imagining a documentary about the word wagons and

7:45the students who went out to do this. I am imagining, you know, novels set in with the protagonist being a researcher going out and talking to people in the field like this. I mean, it sounds like such an inspirational archive of information with just probably some of the best anecdotes you'll ever find. I think that's true. And I hope you follow up on your instincts. Well, maybe one of our listeners should, at least. So why don't we go on to some of,

Tracking down regional words

8:17what are some of your favorite words that we didn't get to in the main episode? Oh, one of my favorites is SCRID, S-C-R-I-D. We learned from the materials we had on hand that it means a fragment of something, a little bit of the whole, and it was used in New England, especially Maine. And I had written up the entry and I thought, oh, this is such a great regional term.

8:48And then I did some internet research and I found a few other New England quotations, which was great. And then I found some lathe maker in, I think it was Santa Clara, California, maybe it was Palo Alto. Yes, I think it was Palo Alto, who used it in a commentary on a blog. He said, I needed just a SCRID more material. Oh, no, this has joked the country. It's no longer

9:23where it's supposed to be. So I decided to email the guy and I said, do you happen to remember where you learned this word? He said, oh, yeah, my girlfriend's from Maine and she taught it to me. Of course. And that's how it spreads. Another one, I'm not sure how to pronounce this. It's Babashili or Bobashili? Babashili. Oh, yes, that's a great word. In our field work, there was a question about what you call a good friend. So we had things like bosom buddy, great pals, all sorts of things.

10:01Now it would be besties, things like that. But there was one person from Texas who said, oh, they're big Bobby Sheelys. And the way the field worker had written it, it looked as though it might be Irish. So we checked all the Irish sources, nothing. And for a long time, we couldn't find anything. But then we discovered in a Faulkner novel that it was used as a verb. The character said, you and sweet thing, Babashili on down to the hotel. It was in the right region. It wasn't Texas,

10:36but I think it was Mississippi. And so that gave us a little clue. Then we found another instance of it meaning a good friend. So all of these little tidbits festered in my mind. And I finally found a reference in a journal called Dialect Notes from early in the 20th century, saying that it was from a Choctaw word. And the University of Wisconsin Libraries just happened

11:09to have a good Choctaw glossary. So I looked through all the B entries, found nothing. But I decided, okay, I'm going to find this. So I looked through every entry until I got to Itibabashili. And I looked at it, and it said, my brother with whom I was suckled. So obviously a very close relationship. And that's the source of Babashili. And it's used mostly in Mississippi,

11:45some in Arkansas, others very closely related. So we published something about this in a query. And we got a letter from someone who had been doing historical research into Aaron Burr and his, what was it, a duel? Oh, yeah. Anyway, people he was corresponding with signed their letters with Babashili before their name.

12:15And so ultimately, that became our earliest citation for the word. But we rounded out the picture by getting this historical information. And then after we published it, we got letters from people saying, oh, my voice camp in Mississippi, we called each other Babashili's. And there's a small college in Mississippi where the yearbook is called Babashili. So it still exists, maybe not

12:47very widely, but people remember it. And it has this wonderful history. That is wonderful.

13:01So I'm trying to imagine how they used it to sign their name. Was it like Babashili Aaron Burr? Or like, was it more, was it like Comrade Aaron Burr? Or was it more like your, you know, devoted servant Aaron Burr? How were they meaning it? It was not Babashili and the name. I should have said it was Babashili, comma, next line, the name. So it's just a sign off.

13:33So like yours truly, your dearest friend, something like that. Right. Wild. Oh, that is so neat. Again, I'm like, someone should make a word game based on the words in the dictionary too. Like there's so much here that people should do things with. I hope someone will. Yeah. Well, Joan, thank you so much for being here. I think that we're going to end with your book recommendations. We always ask everyone there are three books that, you know, have stuck with

14:04you over time that were especially meaningful to you that, you know, you might recommend to a friend or that would make a great gift.

Book recommendations and closing

14:11My all-time favorite fiction book is by Wallace Stegner called Angle of Repose. And it is set both in the late 1960s and a century earlier with the contemporary protagonist, a historian who has recently been divorced and has discovered he has a bone disease so he can't get out of a wheelchair. And he's trying to find meaning in life. So he decides to write a biography of his grandparents.

14:46And so we go back and forth between the contemporary and the historical. But the grandmother was kind of a New York socialite, not New York City, but upstate New York, who married a very unlikely suitor, a guy who was a mining engineer who wanted to live in the West. And she agreed to go with him to the most remote and rustic places she could imagine as he worked on

15:18various mining projects. And so the relationship between those two people and the contemporary grandson was very interesting. And I found this book frustrating because the relationships were so difficult in many ways. It was endearing because you really like these people. And it was ultimately heartbreaking because the grandparents endured a tragedy that meant that they could never be close

15:54again. They lived side by side, but the closeness of their relationship was just gone. And Stegner is one of my favorite authors, so he certainly did a good job with that. A very different one, much more contemporary, is by an Irish author named Claire Keegan. And the book I'm thinking of was published in 2010 in the UK, but in 2022 in the US. And it's called Foster. It's a

16:24novella, so very short, about an Irish family, a pretty boorish father, a mother who already has six or eight children and is expecting another one. And she decides that her nine-year-old daughter could spend the summer with some shirttail relatives in another community. And so it's the exploration by the child of life that's very different. And her recognition that it's not just different because she

16:58has enough to eat now or she has school clothes or other things she wouldn't have had, like a bath in which she was the only person to use the water. More importantly, that parents can be tender. And it turns out that these foster parents have lost their own son. And for them, it's a relearning to love. And it's a very tender book, and I highly recommend it.

17:30That sounds wonderful. And a more word-related book is by Cori Stamper called Word by Word. Have you? You've probably met that. Yeah, I love Cori's writing. She's very witty. Also, very serious. And gives a wonderful explanation or reminiscence of what it was like to learn to be a dictionary editor, including what you do when you realize that the definition of nude in Merriam-Webster implies, and this is nude in terms

18:07of a color, not unclothed nude, implies that nude means the color of the skin of a white person. Yeah. And so how do you rectify that? And it was a very interesting explanation of how the group decided to tackle this and come to a better resolution. Yeah, no, it's a great story. Actually, I'm talking to her in about a month about her next book that's coming out that is about colors. So I just started reading that, but of course,

18:42it's wonderful, and I'm looking forward to finishing it. But yeah, her first book, Word by Word. Yes. Yeah. Also fabulous. So I would recommend all three of those. Oh, those are great. Thank you so much, Joan. Thank you for being here, and thank you for all the work you've done on D.A.R.E. over the years, too. Oh, well, you know, it was the job of a lifetime, and I feel incredibly lucky. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds like a dream job. Where should people go to, you know, support D.A.R.E.,

19:14to find D.A.R.E., and anything else you might want them to find? Anyone who would like to contribute can go to giving at uwsupport.org. And can they designate this is for D.A.R.E.? Yes, they can look it up on the list of opportunities and give it to D.A.R.E. Wonderful. Wonderful. And subscribing, I imagine subscribing helps, too, right? Oh, yes, it does. We do get royalties from Harvard University Press.

19:48Good. So either way, you can support this amazing project, and you can also look up those hundred sample words if you want to get a sense of what they're doing, and you can ask your library to get a subscription so that you can dig in even deeper and hear all those wonderful recordings. Yes, I hope people do that. Thank you so much. Again, that's Joan Houston Hall, longtime editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English. Thank you so much, Joan. You're very welcome.