Speaker 1: Good morning, students. My name is Professor Nucleman.
Speaker 2: This is Bear Grease one O one where we study
Speaker 2: thanks for gotten but relevant and look for insight and
Speaker 2: unlikely places. I'm so glad that you're here on this
Speaker 2: Chili December morning. Yeah, hey, will you stop doing that?
Speaker 2: Quit throwing stuff?
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Today we're going to do things a little bit different
Speaker 2: than usual. We have a very distinguished guest lecture today
Speaker 2: here by the name of doctor Brooks Blevins, an insightful man,
Speaker 2: and he'll be talking to us about regional dialects and language,
Speaker 2: but specifically our most treasured and most significant dialect in America,
Speaker 2: the Hillbilly dialect of the Ozarks and Appalachian regions. But
Speaker 2: we're gonna use this class period as a celebration of
Speaker 2: all of America's varied and wonderful dialects. So remember this
Speaker 2: is a celebration of regional dialects. If you will, are
Speaker 2: there any questions before we get started?
Speaker 3: Excuse me, Professor nukelemb I just wanted to know. Will
Speaker 3: we have an opportunity to talk about the regional dialects
Speaker 3: of where we're from as well?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, you will be able to give examples of
Speaker 2: dialects of where you're from, So be thinking and paying attention.
Speaker 2: My name is Clay nukelemb and this is the Bear
Speaker 2: Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
Speaker 2: for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
Speaker 2: story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Speaker 2: Presented by FHF gear, American Aid purpose built hunting and
Speaker 2: fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the
Speaker 2: place as we explore much. Okay, students, let's pipe down
Speaker 2: as we begin our journey into the wonder of regional dialects.
Speaker 2: We're all so different and so unique in so many ways.
Speaker 2: Let's listen to doctor Blevens. You know, he's written like
Speaker 2: fifteen books on the history of the Ozarks.
Speaker 1: Very interesting man.
Speaker 2: Remember we'll be using the Ozark and Appalachian dialects, but
Speaker 2: really we're gonna see how regional dialects apply all over
Speaker 2: the United States. Here's doctor Blevins, and he'll be jumping
Speaker 2: right in, I mean, like fast.
Speaker 4: Let me let me start out by saying, we all
Speaker 4: have a dialect. You may, you may. You probably only
Speaker 4: recognize it from other people because most people think, well,
Speaker 4: I talk, I talk normal, and everybody else is a
Speaker 4: little a little crazy. But every language on earth that
Speaker 4: there are enough speakers in that language, you have dialects,
Speaker 4: and it's just a form of a language that is
Speaker 4: specific to a particular region or a particular group of
Speaker 4: speakers within that language. And you know, you could have
Speaker 4: ethnic dialects. In our case, you're talking about regional dialects.
Speaker 4: And around the United States, it's a big place, and
Speaker 4: we have regional dialects. They're probably not as not as
Speaker 4: pronounced today as they once were because we all watch
Speaker 4: the same TV and listen. We've been listening to the
Speaker 4: same radio for one hundred years, and we got the
Speaker 4: same Internet, and so there's a lot of these homogenizing
Speaker 4: influences that sort of erode the corners the sharp edges
Speaker 4: of our dialects and make us speak more like each other.
Speaker 4: But a lot of linguists will will argue that the
Speaker 4: dialects aren't going away. They you know, they might be.
Speaker 4: They might seem like it, and they may we may
Speaker 4: start to talk more and more like somebody on the
Speaker 4: six o'clock news. But uh, you know, I've heard arguments
Speaker 4: that that dialects are they're they're with us, and they'll
Speaker 4: stay with us. They'll just change like language does over
Speaker 4: the years. But that's but so I got interested in this.
Speaker 4: And it's really what you might call an Upland South
Speaker 4: dialect or a hillbilly dialect, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 4: It's a dialect that that people and a lot of
Speaker 4: Appalachia would have, and a lot of the Upper South
Speaker 4: and the Ozarks and even parts of Texas and Oklahoma
Speaker 4: and stuff like that, and just one of many dialects
Speaker 4: around the country. But but it would sound pretty pretty similar.
Speaker 4: And we can trace a lot of these influences back
Speaker 4: to English settlers from centuries ago, to the people that
Speaker 4: we call the Scots, Irish people from Ulster, northern Ireland,
Speaker 4: who came over in the seventeen hundreds, and a lot
Speaker 4: of their language patterns and eccentricities have survived into the
Speaker 4: modern day. We can even go all the way back
Speaker 4: to the Vikings. And that's always you know, everybody likes
Speaker 4: talking about Vikings, I guess, and you can because a
Speaker 4: lot of people don't realize is that, you know, any
Speaker 4: language is organic and it's always evolving and stuff like that.
Speaker 4: But if you look back at beginning of the late
Speaker 4: seven hundreds and continuing into the ten hundreds, there were
Speaker 4: these periodic Viking invasions and settlements and stuff in the
Speaker 4: British Isles, and even their language seeped its way into
Speaker 4: English over time, and a lot of the weird words
Speaker 4: that have survived, and you know, if you want to
Speaker 4: call it hillbilly dialect or up in the South dialect whatever, uh,
Speaker 4: we can even trace back to to to old Norse
Speaker 4: or or Viking words. But one of the things that
Speaker 4: that I've noticed over the years is and pretty much
Speaker 4: everybody in the United States notices this, that there are
Speaker 4: certain dialects that we associate with intelligence, and certain that
Speaker 4: certain dialects that we don't. And the dialect that I
Speaker 4: grew up with here in the Ozarks is one of
Speaker 4: those that we don't necessarily associate with with great intelligence.
Speaker 4: It's it kind of falls into that greater Southern dialect thing,
Speaker 4: where you know, people from other parts of the country
Speaker 4: hear you and often just jump to the assumption that
Speaker 4: and this, you know, this person is uneducated or maybe
Speaker 4: they don't know that much. And and so what what
Speaker 4: a lot of us end up doing is when we
Speaker 4: go off to college or we start a career or something,
Speaker 4: we've become very self concent about the way we sound,
Speaker 4: and we start working on our own dialect to be
Speaker 4: to kind of tamp it down and to sound more
Speaker 4: like everybody else. And I'm pretty sure I've done that
Speaker 4: to some degree in my life. I know I did
Speaker 4: it a lot earlier. You know, you can form a
Speaker 4: little bit dialectically and try to sound like other people.
Speaker 4: But what often happens is once you get more comfortable
Speaker 4: in your career, once you've achieved something or another, once
Speaker 4: you don't have to worry about seeming to be stupid
Speaker 4: to somebody else, that who's whose opinion you value. I
Speaker 4: find that a lot of people are are then more
Speaker 4: comfortable to kind of slip back into that dialect and
Speaker 4: sort of pick it up and maybe value it more.
Speaker 4: Maybe think of the way your your grandparents, your your
Speaker 4: elders said certain words or the way they phrase things,
Speaker 4: and there's a certain pride in that and a certain
Speaker 4: value that you don't want to let go of. And
Speaker 4: so so I think a lot of people, uh are
Speaker 4: probably like me, and they and they feel, you know,
Speaker 4: more confident, and in talking that way, there's there's certain
Speaker 4: there's certain code words that linguists would tell you, like
Speaker 4: the word own O N which I which I pronounce
Speaker 4: own with a with a long oh. That's one of
Speaker 4: the first ones I think that you would if you
Speaker 4: were trying to lose your southern accent or your hillbilly
Speaker 4: accent or whatever, you know, you would you would switch
Speaker 4: that to on. There are various ways that you can
Speaker 4: say the word O N. And sometimes that's a that's
Speaker 4: kind of an indicator to other people of where you're
Speaker 4: from or where you're trying to sound like you're you're from.
Speaker 4: And and I've heard people say, well, that's you know,
Speaker 4: I started saying on when I was in grad school
Speaker 4: or med school or whatever and instead of own, because
Speaker 4: that's you know, that's one of those kind of trigger
Speaker 4: words that people. We turn a lot of short vowel
Speaker 4: sounds into long vowel sounds. And it's the same way
Speaker 4: if if you ever watched Andy Griffith show, Uh Andy's
Speaker 4: uh has ain't be. It's not it's not aunt b
Speaker 4: or aunt be in Mayberry, it's ain't b. And when
Speaker 4: I grew up, it was always ain't so, and so
Speaker 4: it was you know, you didn't. You didn't say aunt
Speaker 4: uh it was it was ain't. That's another one of
Speaker 4: those examples of a of a word that we've taken
Speaker 4: what would normally be in standard English a short vowel
Speaker 4: sound and turned it into a long vow sound.
Speaker 2: Okay, students, that was downright fascinating. I know, for instance, me,
Speaker 2: I used to have a much thicker accent before I
Speaker 2: began my distinguished career here at Cornell University in New York,
Speaker 2: where I have been surrounded by the greatest minds in America,
Speaker 2: including Andy Bernard, who now lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He's
Speaker 2: in the paper business, and Boone biographer Robert Morgan, dear
Speaker 2: friend of mine. I know over the years my language
Speaker 2: has been honed like a bowie knife on Arkansas whetstone,
Speaker 2: polished like a slick rock on the outside bend of
Speaker 2: the Caddo River. Now, I'd like to take some questions
Speaker 2: from the class. Have you recognized a regional dialect where
Speaker 2: you live that you'd like to discuss?
Speaker 1: Yes, young man, with your hand up.
Speaker 3: My name is Josh and my family is from northern Michigan.
Speaker 3: And a couple of things that I've noticed about the
Speaker 3: way that they speak is anytime they use a word
Speaker 3: that has a short o sound, that short o sound
Speaker 3: comes from not the back of the throat, but more
Speaker 3: from the nasal passages. For instance, my grandfather when he
Speaker 3: would go cut firewood, he would say that he wanted
Speaker 3: logs cut twenty four inches. So I've noticed that. Another
Speaker 3: thing is that there's a few slang words that they
Speaker 3: would also use as well. For instance, if something was
Speaker 3: notable or caught your attention, you'd say op op, and
Speaker 3: then might you might follow that up with oh, look
Speaker 3: it over there, not look at it, but actually look it.
Speaker 3: Are those the kind of regional dialect idiosyncrasies that you're
Speaker 3: talking about, Professor Nukem.
Speaker 2: Hmmm, that's that's interesting, very interesting. But no, no, man,
Speaker 2: that that's just hogwash. You're gonna need to wash your
Speaker 2: mouth out with bear grease Lys soap on that one.
Speaker 5: Son.
Speaker 2: But let's get back to doctor Blevin's and remember we'll
Speaker 2: be taking more questions later, so we'll get back to
Speaker 2: the rest of the class. Doctor Blevin's gone.
Speaker 4: Any dialect consists of three parts. There's accent, that's how
Speaker 4: you pronounce words, how you sound. That's the first thing
Speaker 4: that we noticed when they come into contact with anybody
Speaker 4: is their their accent, and some of those are more
Speaker 4: pronounced than others. So that's one part how how you
Speaker 4: sound when you talk. Then there's what we call the
Speaker 4: lexicon or vocabulary, and this is most dialects will have
Speaker 4: certain words or phrases, especially certain words that you might
Speaker 4: not hear in standard English. And we've certainly got some
Speaker 4: of those words here in the Ozarks and an Appalachia
Speaker 4: in the South and that that you would probably not
Speaker 4: here in New York or California or or somewhere like that,
Speaker 4: but are are still kind of standard words in our language.
Speaker 4: And again, any any regional dialect is going to have
Speaker 4: their their own little lexicon. It's not going to be extensive,
Speaker 4: but there are going to be unusual words. And then
Speaker 4: the last one, the one that's not the funnest one
Speaker 4: to talk about, but it's one that that linguists say
Speaker 4: is the one that that holds on the longest, is grammar.
Speaker 4: Every dialect has these peculiar grammatical features, uh, and usually
Speaker 4: that's a code word for bad grammar. Peculiar grammatical features
Speaker 4: just means people who use bad grammar, but it's bad
Speaker 4: grammar that is, uh, that can be standard to a
Speaker 4: certain place. So if I say, if I'm talking about
Speaker 4: my garden and say what my peas growed great last year,
Speaker 4: our house got a gas leak and load up, you
Speaker 4: know that that kind of thing. In other words, bad grammar,
Speaker 4: bad subject predicate, you know, linking up there.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: And there are there are plenty of those in in
Speaker 4: the dialect of the of the South and the hillbilly
Speaker 4: dialect in general. My kids have always had great fun
Speaker 4: making fun of me because I talk. I tend to
Speaker 4: talk one way at home, and you know, I've slipped
Speaker 4: very easily back into israc County ease when when I'm
Speaker 4: at home. But they will hear me like giving a
Speaker 4: speech or something at a at a college and and uh,
Speaker 4: and that's my that's my smart voice, you know that.
Speaker 4: And they like making fun of me over using my
Speaker 4: smart voice. But I've tried, I've tried not to make
Speaker 4: those so starkly, you know, separate from each other. But
Speaker 4: it's it's sometimes, it's sometimes again, it's just kind of
Speaker 4: that that process of code switching where where you slip
Speaker 4: into comfortable speech when you're at home, whether it's bad
Speaker 4: grammar or using unusual words that most people don't know.
Speaker 4: When I was a kid growing up here on the farm,
Speaker 4: I don't know that my grandparents ever use the word
Speaker 4: sack or bag. It was always a poke, you know,
Speaker 4: put that in a poke or carry that over, you know,
Speaker 4: go grab that potent and fill it up. Like a
Speaker 4: lot of words, we can trace, you know, the origins
Speaker 4: that word back, and we know it. You know, it
Speaker 4: entered English probably through Norman French poque, which was a
Speaker 4: word for pouch or pocket, and then of course the
Speaker 4: Normans were if you trace them back far enough, they
Speaker 4: were Vikings at some point, and even in Old Icelandic
Speaker 4: into the early twentieth century, if you had been in
Speaker 4: an Iceland at that time, again a kind of a
Speaker 4: descendant of a Viking language, if you carried something in
Speaker 4: a sack or a bag, it was a pokey, and
Speaker 4: so our poke and the the Icelandic people's pokey came
Speaker 4: from the same root word. And so it's probably just
Speaker 4: an old Viking word that survived in this one place
Speaker 4: in the in the United States, where it died out
Speaker 4: in most other places. But that's a word that you
Speaker 4: could you could still hear in the rural Ozarks and
Speaker 4: rural Appalachia today. You're probably not going to hear it
Speaker 4: all that often, But a paper poke.
Speaker 2: Okay, class, that was an invigorating exploration of oratory energy
Speaker 2: by doctor Blevins. You know they say he wants lectured
Speaker 2: a summertime bear gorge and on blackberries right into his
Speaker 2: winter den. The sucker went to sleep right there in
Speaker 2: the spring. Can you imagine doctor Blevins's grandparents.
Speaker 1: Calling a sack of poke? That is hilarious?
Speaker 2: Does any one of you have an example of a
Speaker 2: word or phrase or thing that maybe your grandparents said,
Speaker 2: or just people in your areas said that might be
Speaker 2: kind of old timmy or regional?
Speaker 1: Anybody? Yes, yes, you young.
Speaker 6: Man Chester Floyd from central eastern Wisconsin. Kind over by
Speaker 6: fond Laccari, you know Leakeuinnebagol. Anyways, Uh, you know people
Speaker 6: always see there like look over there, But in Wisconsin
Speaker 6: we said deer, like, hey, look out the window, there's
Speaker 6: some deer over there. Is that kind of what you're
Speaker 6: talking about?
Speaker 7: Well?
Speaker 2: No, that was ridiculous and a butchery of a beautiful
Speaker 2: language that took thousands of years to develop. Man has
Speaker 2: sculpted the English language like a glacier carving out a valley,
Speaker 2: and what you just said was more like the work
Speaker 2: of a cat five bulldozer with a Marlborough red hanging
Speaker 2: out of the driver's mouth. Son, Thank you for sharing
Speaker 2: about Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: But let's get back to doctor Blevin's Okay.
Speaker 4: There are a handful of things that help dialect survive
Speaker 4: in certain places where it might die out in other place,
Speaker 4: or at least, you know, strong dialect survive. One of
Speaker 4: those is being in a rural place. And so you know,
Speaker 4: we got that covered in most places like where we
Speaker 4: are now, and in a lot of places where if
Speaker 4: you're in a rural area, dialect is more likely to
Speaker 4: you know, a strong dialect is more likely to survive
Speaker 4: if you're in a place that has a low formal
Speaker 4: educational attainment level, so where people, you know, we're less
Speaker 4: likely to have gone to college than in other places.
Speaker 4: That's another thing that ensures that these regional dialects or
Speaker 4: ethnic dialects or whatever they are, they will survive more
Speaker 4: into the future. And then the third one is poverty,
Speaker 4: and of course these all often work in tandem. Low education, poverty,
Speaker 4: rural areas, and that's why if you go looking for
Speaker 4: a hillbilly dialect or any sort of strong regional dialect.
Speaker 4: You're more likely to find that in a place that
Speaker 4: has at least a couple of these factors working in
Speaker 4: his favor. And you're especially likely to find it if
Speaker 4: you've got all three of them where. But one of
Speaker 4: the things I like to do when I when I'm
Speaker 4: talking about dialect is I'll I'll put up words on
Speaker 4: a screen. I'll ask people how they pronounce them and uh,
Speaker 4: and then you know, we'll see how you pronounce it
Speaker 4: in the Ozarks or Appalachia or something like that. And
Speaker 4: and another one was the word uh directly. When I
Speaker 4: was in high school or even in college, if you'd
Speaker 4: asked me to spell the word that I said directly,
Speaker 4: I guess I would have spelled it d R E
Speaker 4: c k l Y. But it's it's actually directly. So
Speaker 4: if you tell somebody I'll be over there directly, it's
Speaker 4: you know, basically, you're saying I'll be over there whenever
Speaker 4: I get ready to. That's one of the things about
Speaker 4: a lot of regional dialects is they tend to be
Speaker 4: efficient and economic. You often cut out a syllable or
Speaker 4: two in the process of saying things, and it just
Speaker 4: you know, it makes it quicker and easier to say
Speaker 4: all bowl. You know, you don't say boil and oil.
Speaker 4: That's too much trouble. Why would you go through all
Speaker 4: that trouble to say extra syllables. So there's a lot
Speaker 4: of that.
Speaker 1: Doctor Blevins. I'd just like to interrupt for a second.
Speaker 2: Here at Cornell University, our student body is the elite
Speaker 2: of America. You know, these children's parents are doctors and
Speaker 2: lawyers and people involved in the tech industry, big oil
Speaker 2: and gas. You know. You referencing poverty and rural life
Speaker 2: and low education would be things these students would have
Speaker 2: just seen in movies. But I'd like to take another
Speaker 2: question from the class. Though, we're focusing on what some
Speaker 2: might call the hillbilly dialect. Remember we're celebrating all of
Speaker 2: America's unique dialects.
Speaker 1: Who has a question, just raise.
Speaker 4: Your hand, professor.
Speaker 5: Professor Professor nukeom Malachi here from Midland, Texas. The things
Speaker 5: that I would have heard is show enough. My grandmother
Speaker 5: used to always say show enough baby. That means for real,
Speaker 5: are you for real the story you're telling me? Show
Speaker 5: enough baby. The second thing I would have heard is overchair,
Speaker 5: but passing them things overchair, that means over there, passing
Speaker 5: those things over there. And then the last thing is
Speaker 5: over yonder, over yonder. That means way over there, over yonder.
Speaker 5: That's that's what you're looking for, right, that's what you
Speaker 5: that's what you're looking for.
Speaker 1: Hmmm, Texas.
Speaker 2: Uh huh, that's that's that's interesting and a very compelling story.
Speaker 2: But no, Nope, that's not really even what we're talking about.
Speaker 2: I'd say that's taking a lot of creative liberty with
Speaker 2: the English language, young man. Uh but but thank you,
Speaker 2: uh doctr Blevin's.
Speaker 1: Just carry on.
Speaker 4: When I'm talking to people about about dialect, one of
Speaker 4: the things I often do is I'll have what I
Speaker 4: call the steps to speaking ozark or speaking hillbilly or whatever.
Speaker 4: And one of the steps I tell people, you know,
Speaker 4: one of the basic ones is changing the us sound
Speaker 4: at the end of words to an ease sound. So,
Speaker 4: for instance, in my garden out here, one of my
Speaker 4: favorite things to eat out of the garden is okra,
Speaker 4: And of course most of the English speaking world would
Speaker 4: call that okra, but it's it's an old tradition and
Speaker 4: linguists date that style of speaking, of changing that US
Speaker 4: sound to an E sound on the end of words,
Speaker 4: all the way back to colonial America. They really don't
Speaker 4: know exactly where where this originates and why, but it
Speaker 4: apparently was kind of a fad in colonial America, maybe
Speaker 4: to differentiate American English from British English. I'm not really
Speaker 4: sure what was going on, but apparently a lot of people,
Speaker 4: you know, started talking that way, and it died out
Speaker 4: in most other places in the country, but it survived
Speaker 4: actually in places like Appalachia and the Ozarks and these
Speaker 4: kind of rural, somewhat isolated places, and still does today.
Speaker 4: So there's, you know, there's all kinds of instances in
Speaker 4: which we take what ling was called the schwa, which
Speaker 4: is the US sound on the end of a word,
Speaker 4: and just turned it into an e sound. So you
Speaker 4: got a Oakrey got the grand O Opry, that's where
Speaker 4: that comes from. There's all kinds of women's names that
Speaker 4: ended A, and when I was a kid, most of them,
Speaker 4: so he got ain't Brthy instead of Bertha, and Marthy
Speaker 4: instead of Martha. And there's My grandma was Alberta. But
Speaker 4: if anybody ever called her at Alberta, you knew they
Speaker 4: were from off they weren't, you know, they weren't from
Speaker 4: around here, because she was always Alberti to everybody who
Speaker 4: knew her well, and almost every woman whose name ended
Speaker 4: with an a was that way, and some men. There
Speaker 4: aren't as many men names that end in that chuaw sound.
Speaker 4: But I can remember my grandpa talking about his uncle Noe,
Speaker 4: and that was Noah like Noah's Arc, but in the
Speaker 4: Hill country it was Noe. And you can even if
Speaker 4: your name was Ira, I r A. Now that one
Speaker 4: changes on the front end and the back end, so
Speaker 4: it doesn't become necessarily Iri. It does become e on
Speaker 4: the end of it. But another one of those, and
Speaker 4: this is more of a Southern pronunciation, tick, is turning
Speaker 4: that eye on the front into a kind of an
Speaker 4: owe sound. So you got instead of Ira, you've got Ari.
Speaker 4: And that's the same that's the same rule that gives
Speaker 4: us tar instead of tire, far instead of fire, war
Speaker 4: instead of wire. You know, you arn your clothes instead
Speaker 4: of iron them. And one of my favorite stories relating
Speaker 4: to changing that long eye sound into kind of an
Speaker 4: awe sound when I was when I was a senior
Speaker 4: in college, we had a little Quizbo tournament, and our
Speaker 4: the dean of our faculty, who was from Massachusetts, was
Speaker 4: the one who was reading the questions. He was out
Speaker 4: Alex Trebek and I don't remember what the question was,
Speaker 4: but the answer to this particular question was the comedian
Speaker 4: Richard Pryor. And my my roommate, whose smartest guy I've
Speaker 4: ever known. You know, he grew up on a farm
Speaker 4: outside of Mamma Spring, Arkansas and very much had that
Speaker 4: you know, kind of hill country accent thing going on.
Speaker 4: And he buzzed in and uh and the dean called
Speaker 4: on him, and my roommate said, Richard PRR. And the
Speaker 4: dean just got this funny look on his face, like,
Speaker 4: what in the world did that? Did that kid just say?
Speaker 4: And uh? And we finally, you know, sort of straightened
Speaker 4: it out. And that's you know, that's how we say,
Speaker 4: that's how we say Prior is pror. And he believed
Speaker 4: us because we were, you know, we were telling the truth.
Speaker 4: But it was you know, it's one of those one
Speaker 4: of those pronunciation ticks that's you know, different from a
Speaker 4: lot of other parts of the country, and that one
Speaker 4: is probably more of kind of a Southern thing in
Speaker 4: general than it is just a just a hillbilly thing.
Speaker 4: So if you ever hear somebody talk about a disaster
Speaker 4: being a tarfhar instead of a tarfire, then you know
Speaker 4: you're in a certain part of the country and you
Speaker 4: have encountered a regional dialect for sure at that point,
Speaker 4: because nobody wants to be involved in a tarfhar.
Speaker 2: Doctr Blevin, excuse me, Let's take another question from the
Speaker 2: class again, looking for regional dialects.
Speaker 1: Who has a question?
Speaker 8: Excuse me, professor. My name is Christy and I grew
Speaker 8: up in Saint Louis, Missouri, which is in the very
Speaker 8: center of the United States. I've been told the people
Speaker 8: from the Midwest have the clearest, most approachable, and easily
Speaker 8: understood accent and dialect of anyone in the country. Do
Speaker 8: you think that's true?
Speaker 7: Hm?
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, thank you.
Speaker 2: I think what you've just done right here, young lady,
Speaker 2: is ostracize yourself from this entire class and this entire
Speaker 2: country by your hoity toity Saint Louis roots. The Cardinals
Speaker 2: have won the World Series like eleven times, but that
Speaker 2: doesn't make a Cardinal and American eagle, now, does it.
Speaker 2: I think you should check yourself before you wreck yourself,
Speaker 2: as some parts of the country say Doctor Blevin's please
Speaker 2: just go on, just carry on.
Speaker 4: And another thing that we had our own phrase for
Speaker 4: was a jarfly. A jarfly is a cicada. It's the
Speaker 4: kind of annual that would come out. I was probably
Speaker 4: thirty years old, and I remember because I can remember
Speaker 4: listening to a radio show and they were talking about
Speaker 4: the cicadas being in full glory, you know, in Washington,
Speaker 4: d c. And I remember thinking, well, that would be
Speaker 4: I'd like to hear them cicadas. See what's going on
Speaker 4: in that very day, I was probably walking through the
Speaker 4: woods and being serenaded by jarflies and didn't know that
Speaker 4: it was the same thing. But it was about that
Speaker 4: time when I figured out that what I called a
Speaker 4: jarfly and what most of the people I grew up
Speaker 4: with called jarflies, were with the rest of the world
Speaker 4: called cicadas. And apparently the reason they were given the
Speaker 4: name jarfly by whoever gave them that name and started,
Speaker 4: you know, calling them that was not because you catch
Speaker 4: them and put them in a jar like you do
Speaker 4: lightning bugs. It's because when you get trees full of
Speaker 4: those things and they really crank up. It just kind
Speaker 4: of jars your you know, just kind of jarsia that
Speaker 4: jarsia enters, that sort of sound that they're that they're making.
Speaker 4: And so we're all speaking the same language. It's just
Speaker 4: these little little peculiarities around the corner of the languages
Speaker 4: that that make them a little different. And as I've said,
Speaker 4: the Scots Irish had a lot of influence on the
Speaker 4: dialect of especially the Upper South, the Appalachia and the Ozarks,
Speaker 4: and some of the old words that we can trace
Speaker 4: back to our Scotch Irish forebears words like Irish for
Speaker 4: cool or nippy. And one of my favorite terms that
Speaker 4: that linguists say was brought over by the Scotch Irish,
Speaker 4: and you'd probably still hear maybe in some places and
Speaker 4: in Scotland, some rural places, is the word ill, not
Speaker 4: meaning someone who's sick, but ill meaning someone who's angry,
Speaker 4: who's who's upset about something. And because I can remember
Speaker 4: my dad pestering my mom about being ill when I
Speaker 4: was a kid, and he wasn't talking about her being sick,
Speaker 4: he was talking about her being in bad mood. If
Speaker 4: you go back and look at the old Norse word,
Speaker 4: or the old Viking word iller uh. It's basically means
Speaker 4: the same thing. It can be mean or evil or
Speaker 4: nasty or something like that. And that word seeped into
Speaker 4: into the language and made its way across and a
Speaker 4: lot of these our rural terms too, because as I
Speaker 4: said it, you know, dialect tends to survive more heartily
Speaker 4: in rural areas. So if I talked about a muley cow,
Speaker 4: the word muley means no horns, so it would be
Speaker 4: a cow with with no horns on it. That's another
Speaker 4: one of those that kind of made its way from
Speaker 4: Scott's Irish Gaelic, you know, whatever, whatever they were bringing across.
Speaker 2: Sorry to interrupt, Dr Blavin, excuse me. I'd like to
Speaker 2: take another question from the class. Anyone have a question.
Speaker 7: My name is Brent and I'm from southeast Darkansas. And
Speaker 7: before we had supper my grandma's she always told us
Speaker 7: to be sure and wrench your hands off, especially if
Speaker 7: we've been cleaning. The big old messis squirrels. It was
Speaker 7: pretty clear to us, young is that the difference between
Speaker 7: Rnch and Rents was cleaner hands? Now, is that what
Speaker 7: you're talking about? A professor, young man?
Speaker 1: That was beautiful. That was beautiful. You had a very
Speaker 1: special grandmother, didn't you.
Speaker 2: Finally, a truly intelligent example of regional dialect. I have
Speaker 2: no idea why that woman said ranch instead of rents.
Speaker 2: It doesn't even make sense. It's not even connected to
Speaker 2: some other country. But it does make some beautiful American
Speaker 2: folk poetry. Thank you for your contribution to this class.
Speaker 2: Rent it's students like you. I don't want to get
Speaker 2: choked up here. It's students like you that make my job,
Speaker 2: in doctor Blevin's job so fulfilling.
Speaker 1: This is why we do it. Carry on, Doctor Blevin's
Speaker 1: just carry on.
Speaker 4: And then we've got a lot of words in our
Speaker 4: lexicon that basically just mean crooked or out of whack,
Speaker 4: out of plum, something like that. You've got words like
Speaker 4: a anti goglin, which you may have heard, or pygoglin
Speaker 4: that means the same thing anti Goglin and sygoglin. There's
Speaker 4: caddie wampus. My favorite is wamper jawled. In my family,
Speaker 4: it was wamper jawled. I think it's probably more commonly
Speaker 4: whopper yawned. And we can trace it back again to
Speaker 4: like Middle and maybe even Old English the word whopper
Speaker 4: was a verb that meant to oscillate or to move
Speaker 4: around erradically. Another fun word and this, I think this
Speaker 4: is a pretty common word and has come common in
Speaker 4: the last thirty years. Is bumfuzzled? Bum fuzzled? Is it
Speaker 4: means to be confused, disoriented, something like that. And it
Speaker 4: was almost exactly twenty five years ago. It was in
Speaker 4: late October of nineteen ninety nine and Bill Clinton was
Speaker 4: president and he used the term bum fuzzled at a
Speaker 4: press conference and he was criticizing the Republican's proposed budget
Speaker 4: for that year, and he said something like this is
Speaker 4: going to bum fuzzle the American people. And the East
Speaker 4: coast and West coast press just went crazy over this
Speaker 4: word because nobody knew what it meant at that time.
Speaker 4: Apparently it wasn't as common as as it is today.
Speaker 4: But in Slate magazine had it whole article dedicated to
Speaker 4: the president using the word the word bum fuzzled and
Speaker 4: a press conference, and they speculated that maybe it's a
Speaker 4: code word that you know, he sent and the secret
Speaker 4: messages to somebody.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: But there was all this speculation on what the what
Speaker 4: the president was saying with bum fuzzled, and they were.
Speaker 4: You know, this is in the very early days of
Speaker 4: the of the internet, so it wasn't as easy just
Speaker 4: to go, you know, look stuff up as it as
Speaker 4: it is today. But i'll just I'll just talk about
Speaker 4: a few more of the rules if you want to
Speaker 4: talk like a like a backwoodsman or you know, somebody
Speaker 4: from Appalachi or the Ozarks. One of the obvious ones
Speaker 4: is you take words that end in ow and turn
Speaker 4: into er. So you've got o yeller, you've got winder.
Speaker 4: You wouldn't have set a menow trap around here, you'd
Speaker 4: set a mintor trap. You go, uh, walking through the meta,
Speaker 4: you know, good old feller, just any pretty much any
Speaker 4: word uh. And I can even remember, you know, the
Speaker 4: the soft drink of mellow yellow. I can remember people
Speaker 4: calling that mellow yeller when I was the k And
Speaker 4: this is one you'll you'll recognize too, if you talk
Speaker 4: about using the word one after a nown, like the
Speaker 4: big one or the next one or the little one.
Speaker 4: It was old Scott's Irish style to just turn it
Speaker 4: into un. So you've got young and biggin, little and
Speaker 4: next and all those any phrase where you would end
Speaker 4: it with one, you just turn it into kind of
Speaker 4: a U N and squeeze them together and again, you know,
Speaker 4: going back to the Andy Griffith Show, which was one
Speaker 4: of the better displays of Upland South dialect that we've
Speaker 4: ever had on a you know, on this kind of
Speaker 4: national basis, he would usually refer to Opie as a
Speaker 4: youngin and not as a as a child or a
Speaker 4: kid or anything like that. It was usually a young
Speaker 4: and so he had ain't b and he had young
Speaker 4: and And my other favorite example of like Hollywood getting
Speaker 4: it right for a change is the movie sling Blade.
Speaker 4: I remember, I think I teared up two or three
Speaker 4: times in that movie. I was so excited. Of course,
Speaker 4: Billy Bob Thornton is also from the Upland South more,
Speaker 4: you know, the wash it talls kind of the edge
Speaker 4: of the wash italls instead of the Ozarks. But we
Speaker 4: all pretty much sound the same. We're not that far apart.
Speaker 4: And there were a couple that won me over. He
Speaker 4: used the term stob and used it correctly. Stob Linguists
Speaker 4: will say, that's our word. Stob is just it's descended
Speaker 4: from kind of a Scottish pronunciation of the word stub,
Speaker 4: kind of what you know, a scot or an Irish
Speaker 4: person would sound like if they said stub, it would
Speaker 4: sound sort of like stob. Like if you bush hog
Speaker 4: a field, you're left with a bunch of little stobs,
Speaker 4: a little tiny stumps in sling blade. The little boy
Speaker 4: was he had this stub of a stick that he's
Speaker 4: warping the ground with. And warping that's another good word.
Speaker 4: You know, you've got to if you're hitting something, you're
Speaker 4: you're warping it. And and Carl comes up and says,
Speaker 4: what are you doing with that stob? And you know,
Speaker 4: it was something that most people probably wouldn't pick up
Speaker 4: on unless you were from an area where you stob regularly.
Speaker 4: And then the other one was at the end where
Speaker 4: I won't give away anything for people who haven't watched
Speaker 4: the movie, but when Carl picks up the phone and
Speaker 4: calls after he's taken care of of Dole instead of Doyle,
Speaker 4: you know, he's taking care of Dole and he and
Speaker 4: he tells him to bring a hurst, and a hurst
Speaker 4: of course, in a lot of rural areas, a hearst
Speaker 4: was an ambulance, as we might say, or an ambulance
Speaker 4: by putting that tea on the end of that. That
Speaker 4: was another one of those things that you often hear
Speaker 4: in southern and you know Appalachian and ozark speech. So
Speaker 4: you got a it's a hearst instead of a hearse
Speaker 4: it's once instead of once, twice instead of twice, give
Speaker 4: me a chance instead of chance. And there you're doing
Speaker 4: a couple of You're you're turning the short a into
Speaker 4: a long a, and you're sticking a T on the
Speaker 4: I don't know why why we do that, why we
Speaker 4: put a t on on the end of a lot
Speaker 4: of words like that, but we do. And that's another
Speaker 4: one of those things that that sling Blade got right,
Speaker 4: and that's why everybody should watch sling Blade.
Speaker 2: Doctor Levin's excuse me again, I'd like to take just
Speaker 2: one last question from the students as we celebrate all
Speaker 2: of America's regional dialects.
Speaker 9: Anyone, thank you, professor. Yeah, my name is Bear and
Speaker 9: I'm from western Arkansas. Uh, my father, grandfather and actually
Speaker 9: as far back as we can remember, pronounce the word
Speaker 9: spelled a c o r n as akren a corn.
Speaker 1: Is that a good example of regional dialect?
Speaker 7: Well?
Speaker 2: Well, well, haven't we saved the best comment for last
Speaker 2: young man.
Speaker 1: That was powerful.
Speaker 2: Just give me a minute here to myself. That was powerful.
Speaker 2: Thank you. Trying not to get emotional, but that was
Speaker 2: raw cultural zeitgeist power. Go ahead, doctor Blebans, just carry
Speaker 2: on with your final point.
Speaker 4: Thank you. My last rule of how to talk hillbilly
Speaker 4: or how to talk oz are it's it's putting an
Speaker 4: A on the front of an action verb. And a
Speaker 4: linguist called this, if I can get this right, an
Speaker 4: archaic intensifying prefix. That's a really fancy way of saying
Speaker 4: sticking an A on the front of something just to
Speaker 4: just to kind of give it a little umph, you know,
Speaker 4: to give it a little more power, which is something
Speaker 4: that linguists say was brought over not by the Scott's Irish,
Speaker 4: but by settlers from a certain region of England where
Speaker 4: that had been common, and it survived in Appalachia and
Speaker 4: the Ozarks more than it has anywhere else. But it's
Speaker 4: also sometimes called a prefixing. And so I can remember
Speaker 4: very vividly from my childhood people talking about, Oh, their
Speaker 4: kids are running in a bucking deers are jumping over
Speaker 4: the fence. You know, you put that A on the
Speaker 4: front of something, and we may think it sounds kind
Speaker 4: of crazy and that it only shows up in Billy
Speaker 4: Bob Thornton movies. But if you think of if you
Speaker 4: think of music, it's in a lot of old songs
Speaker 4: that we still have, like the ten Days or the
Speaker 4: twelve Days of Christmas, ten lords a leaping, eight maids
Speaker 4: of milking, seven swans of swimming, six geese a laying.
Speaker 4: As recently as the seventeen hundreds, that would have been
Speaker 4: a pretty common thing.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 4: The old song a hunting we will go if you
Speaker 4: remember that one from childhood, hunting we will go, hunting,
Speaker 4: we will go. Uh, there's even a segment in there.
Speaker 4: Let's see, we'll we'll catch a bear and cut his
Speaker 4: hair and then we'll let him go. I don't know
Speaker 4: if if bear grease you know, supports that that kind
Speaker 4: of treatment of bears, But that that's one that's another
Speaker 4: one of those peculiar grammatical features that a lot of times,
Speaker 4: if you if you grew up in that dialect, you're
Speaker 4: probably using don't even realize you're using it. Yeah, you
Speaker 4: see what I did there, and it's you know, I
Speaker 4: think it's a it's a good thing to be comfortable
Speaker 4: with your dialect to a certain degree, and especially if
Speaker 4: you're from south of a certain point in the United States,
Speaker 4: you're you sometimes feel kind of shamed into into sloughing
Speaker 4: that off and conform in to standard English. But I
Speaker 4: don't feel compelled any more to do that. And even
Speaker 4: though I'm sure I do a lot of times. You know,
Speaker 4: I always tell people just, you know, talk how you
Speaker 4: want to talk, and talk how you feel comfortable talking
Speaker 4: if you can get away with it. You know, we're
Speaker 4: excited about dialects and uniqueness and all that kind of
Speaker 4: stuff till it starts costing us money and then it's time,
Speaker 4: you know, to talk like the guy on the on
Speaker 4: the evening news.
Speaker 2: Doctor Blevin's. That was very informative. I remember that you
Speaker 2: had a story about going to church. If you don't
Speaker 2: mind go ahead and tell us that story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this this little church and in the Arkansas Ozarks
Speaker 4: that had invited me to come and speak one Sunday morning.
Speaker 4: And and I'm not a preacher, and you know, I
Speaker 4: wouldn't feel comfortable at all, you know, launching into a
Speaker 4: sermon or anything like that, and nobody would, nobody else
Speaker 4: would be comfortable if I if I tried to do
Speaker 4: that too. So I actually I took the the Adam
Speaker 4: and Eve's story from the Bible and I rendered it
Speaker 4: in basically in hillbilly language. And I'm not trying to
Speaker 4: be irreverent. This is the this is the Adam and
Speaker 4: Eve in the Garden of Eden story. Now, once upon
Speaker 4: a time, and that garden of Eden was a snake,
Speaker 4: and that snake was as smart as could be. He
Speaker 4: sidled up to this little goal and he says, look
Speaker 4: at here. There's fruit of hanging everywhere, is off in
Speaker 4: the trees and bushes, and this here garden. And you're
Speaker 4: a telling me that the Lord said gens can't eat
Speaker 4: an every bite of it. No, the gal says, I reckon,
Speaker 4: we can eat airy. We want acepting that fruit on
Speaker 4: that big and over there right smack dab in the middle.
Speaker 4: The old Master said, don't be a messing with that,
Speaker 4: don't even touch it. If and we do, we'll surely
Speaker 4: pass on. Well, that snake was an andre dickens, just
Speaker 4: plum full of devilment. He says, why that ain't right.
Speaker 4: You ain't about to die. The Lord don't want you
Speaker 4: eating the goodies off that big tree, because when you
Speaker 4: do you'll be just as sharp as he is, and
Speaker 4: that's the gospel truth, or the Lord can strike me down. Well,
Speaker 4: this old gal took a gander of that tree that
Speaker 4: she ain't supposed to be nowhere's around, and she got
Speaker 4: to study on them how larp and that fruit would be, Oh,
Speaker 4: it would be the stewed rosin. So she peeped around
Speaker 4: this away in that way, she reached over and snatched
Speaker 4: her apple and etter aback. Then she carried some to
Speaker 4: a feller, and he had him a little bit of it.
Speaker 4: Soon as the both of them had gnawed off a
Speaker 4: piece and swallowed it, plumped down their goosele. Well, you
Speaker 4: better know something powerful commenced working on their thinking directly.
Speaker 4: They come too and figured out they was naked as
Speaker 4: a jaybird. So the old gal rustled up a jaggu
Speaker 4: leaves off a catoffie tree and hemmed them into something
Speaker 4: looked like a big old night shirt. She fixed up
Speaker 4: some short riches for the fella. It being right peculiar
Speaker 4: for men to sold long about dusky dark, Here come
Speaker 4: the Lord of walking through the garden, and they heard
Speaker 4: him and pushed up. The lord hollered out, where are you?
Speaker 4: The fella hollered back right here. Lord, I heard you coming,
Speaker 4: but I got scared and hit out on account of
Speaker 4: my nakedness. Well, who in the dickens told you he
Speaker 4: is naked? Said the Lord. I swan you's been eating
Speaker 4: off that tree. I said to leave bee, ain't you?
Speaker 4: Then the fella says, hit was this old gal you
Speaker 4: put in here with me? Lord? I know it? She'd
Speaker 4: be more trouble than a wild cat in a paper poke.
Speaker 4: She brung me something to eat, and I added, seeing
Speaker 4: as how I ain't in the habit of fixing my
Speaker 4: mowan dinner. So the Lord says to this old gal,
Speaker 4: how come you to do such a thing? She says, hit,
Speaker 4: was that drotted snake? Why he bumfuzzled me so much?
Speaker 4: My mind just clabbered up.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 4: You might think that snake would have tailed it out
Speaker 4: of here by now, but he ain't done it. And
Speaker 4: you better know the Lord was ill as a hornet. Oh,
Speaker 4: he cut his eyes at that snake, and he sure
Speaker 4: enough told him how the cow eat the cabbage. Because
Speaker 4: of this here mess you made for the rest of
Speaker 4: time and creation, You're gonna crawl around down on your
Speaker 4: belly all caddywampus in the dirt. You and this here
Speaker 4: old gal ain't gonna like each other. A tall fact
Speaker 4: of business. Her youngins is gonna stomp on your youngin's heads,
Speaker 4: and your youngins is gonna use pis in his teeth
Speaker 4: to bite her youngin's heels. Then the Lord gave the
Speaker 4: old gal and her feller are talking to like they
Speaker 4: ain't never heard. He said to the old gal, you're
Speaker 4: gonna get in a family way, and having that young
Speaker 4: and will hurt you a right smart and to see
Speaker 4: to it that you're told never ceases. You're gonna be
Speaker 4: stuck with this here feller, what tattled on you and
Speaker 4: what can't cook her soul for the rest of your life.
Speaker 4: As for you, Feller, the Lord told him, you aren't
Speaker 4: a done what you did just because your wife told
Speaker 4: you to. For that, You're gonna spend your life at
Speaker 4: digging in this hard, rocky ground just to survive. You'll
Speaker 4: have to live all for polke salad and lambs quarters
Speaker 4: and squirrel. And when some ever you fix on to
Speaker 4: grow in something, you'll be tormented by pigweed and poor
Speaker 4: joe and crabgrass and every other infernal weed under the heavens,
Speaker 4: your sweat' water the fields, but it's salt will pies
Speaker 4: in the ground, and one day, one day, you'll go
Speaker 4: back to the dirt what made you, and they ain't
Speaker 4: nary a thing you can do about it.
Speaker 2: I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode. I want
Speaker 2: to think are distinguished guest lecture Dr Brooks, Blevins and
Speaker 2: all of our wonderful students. Sometimes the things that appear
Speaker 2: to be differences are actually the things.
Speaker 1: That make us the same.
Speaker 2: I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear, Grease
Speaker 2: and Brents this country life podcast.
Speaker 1: Please leave us a review on.
Speaker 2: iTunes, Share this episode with somebody this week.
Speaker 1: We hope you have a wonderful Christmas.
Speaker 2: Seasons cheap the wild places wild, so that's where the
Speaker 2: bears live.