Volume I of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE),
published to wide acclaim in 1985, captured the wondrous variety
and creativeness of American folk words and expressions and tickled
the imagination of lovers of language around the world. Decades in
preparation, the DARE corpus reflects the liveliness of English as
it is spoken on America's main streets and country roads-the
regional metaphors and similes passed along within homes and
communities. Like its popular predecessor, Volume II is a treasury
of vernacular Americanisms. In Virginia a goldfinch is a dandelion
bird, in Missouri an insufficient rain shower a drizzle-fizzle.
Gate was Louis Armstrong's favorite sender (a verbal spur to a
sidekick in a band), a usage that probably originated from the fact
that gates swing. Readers will bedazzled by the wealth of
entries-more than 11,000-contained in this second volume alone. The
two and a half pages on "dirt" reveal that a small marble is a dirt
pea in the South. To eat dried apples, a curious rural euphemism
for becoming pregnant, appears in the five pages on "eat." Seven
pages on "horn" and related words take readers on a tour of the
animal and nether worlds: horned lark, horned frog, horned pout
(look that one up), and that horned fellow, the devil. Initiated
under the leadership of Frederic G. Cassidy, DARE represents an
unprecedented attempt to document the living language of the entire
country. The project's primary tool was a carefully worded survey
of 1,847 questions touching on most aspects of everyday life and
human experience. Over a five-year period fieldworkers interviewed
natives of 1,002 communities, a patchwork of the United States in
all its diversity. The result is a database of more than two and a
half million items-a monument to the richness of American folk
speech. Additionally, some 7,000 publications, including novels,
diaries, and small-town newspapers, have yielded a bountiful
harvest of local idioms. Computer-generated maps accompanying many
of the entries illustrate the regional distribution of words and
phrases. The entries contained in Volume II-from the poetic and
humorous to the witty and downright bawdy-will delight and inform
readers.
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