Minnesota English in the news

Nice piece about Minnesota English by Andy Rathbun available here. Looks like he talked to about everybody you could on the subject, including some nice on-the-ground stories from speakers.

People like to compare Minnesota and Wisconsin, it seems like. Minnesota's thriving economically while Wisconsin sinks into oblivion these days and they're vastly better than Wisconsin at college hockey right now, but they don't have much going on this year in the NFL. But they're keep pace dialect-wise.

The Wisconsin Englishes Project folks are said to have something new in the works about vowels in Wisconsin and Minnesota ... stay tuned for that.

Dialect survey

There's a ton of work happening right now on campus about how people think about regional English, in various ways and from various perspectives. Here's one cool project ... take it and pass the word.

The map here, from Rick Aschmann and HuffPo, just because. Not because + noun. Just because.

Essay Contest: Dictionary of American Regional English

How cool does it get? DARE is now holding an essay contest -- just 500 little words -- on this question:

how would you use DARE to enrich and improve your writing?

Deadline is April 30 and the winner gets a 3-year subscription to the digital edition of DARE. Full details here.

Ready, set, go!

"You people"

Ann Romney's dismissive “we’ve given all you people need to know” has gone viral, I read. On Daily Kos, you get this response:

I don't know about you, but where I come from, that's called high falutin' and condescending. I wonder if her nose was in the air when she said it? No video accompanies.

Well, I'd call it much worse than that.  I can't hear the phrase 'you people' today without instantly getting racist overtones or something related. (Here, it's classist.) Good old urbandictionary.com gives the classic story of Ross Perot using a very similar phrase before the NAACP, including this:

Willie Clark, president of the N.A.A.C.P. branch in San Bernadino, Calif., said the overall tone of Mr. Perot's remarks and particularly his use of the phrase "your people" reflected how culturally out of touch he was with his audience.

The reaction to Ann Romney's comment could well be in good measure due to the fact that it reinforces the notion that she, and they, are culturally out of touch with their audience, namely the American people.

But I'm actually left wondering about the history of this phrase. It's cleared risen in written usage, according to the Ngram below, for American English (click to embiggen).

I poked around in a bunch of the early attestations and where they were ghosts (mostly where 'you' ended a sentence and 'people' started a new one), the early ones mostly look like they're just addressing some group of people. By the 1970s, you can find some, but ever there it's hardly so clear. Anybody know when the modern meaning got established?

(Image of the t-shirt from here.)

"The charm of a real voice": "Good Old Boy usages"

Today's NYT Book Review covers Gregg Allman's new autobiography. The book was co-authored with Alan Light, and the review addresses some of the issues that come with that particular kind of collaboration:

“My Cross to Bear” has all the earmarks of a text dictated by its subject and cleaned up by someone else, meaning it has too many ho-hum moments but also the charm of a real voice. In Allman’s case, that’s a lot of correct Good Old Boy usages (“you didn’t want to wear no pair of wool pants without no drawers on”) that may challenge readers not conversant with that tongue. 

Now,  it's not my place to judge whether "you didn’t want to wear no pair of wool pants without no drawers on" is 'correct' Good Old Boy. I'm not even sure exactly what parameters define Good Old Boy as a tongue. I'm thinking 'tongue' means sociolect, and I've got some hunches about its characteristics.

But does that sentence actually challenge any native speaker of American English?  I think that 'drawers' is still widely known as a term for 'underwear', right? And the negative concord has got to be easily interpretable by native speakers of any kind of English. Colorful, yeah, but challenging to understand? Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure the sentence is all that charming. And be that as it may, I sure ain't wearing no wool pants without no drawers on. 

some other body

He's baaaaaaaack. George W. Bush reappeared yesterday to wish for distance from the tax cuts associated with his name:

“I wish they weren’t called the Bush tax cuts,” the former president said as he kicked off the Bush Institute Conference on Taxes and Economic Growth in New York City. “If they’re called some other body’s tax cuts, they’re probably less likely to be raised.”

Yup, it looks like other infixed in somebody. Other is famously connected to another bit of infix-y-ish-ness, namely a whole nother. It's gotta be an infix here — insertion of material into the middle of a word, like 'Homeric' (= Simpson, not Greek poet) edu-ma-cation or saxa-ma-phone, or 'expletive' out-fuckin-rageous infixation.

The form is hardly new, though it's "completely ungrammatical" for the one native speaker I've asked. Chuck Berry's lyrics for "It wasn't me" include this:

It wasn't me, baby, no it wasn't me, baby.
It must have been some other body, uh uh, baby, it wasn't me 

Of course Chuck Berry played with language for a living.

"If proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go."

That's Elmore Leonard, quoted here in Olen Steinhauer's piece about Leonard's new novel, Raylan. Here's the fuller quote:

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the ­narrative.

I like it.  Steinhauer, though, doesn't. Or at least he's torn by it:

Jazzy prose that occasionally lets go of “proper usage” is Leonard’s trademark. He’s a stylist of forward motion, placing narrative acceleration above inconveniences like pronouns and helping verbs. While this creates in most readers a heightened sense of excitement, newcomers may find the transition from complete sentences daunting; it may take a little time to accept Leonard’s prose before you allow it to do its work on you. I’ll admit to having to make such an adjustment when beginning “Raylan.” At the same time, I’m also a novelist who lives in fear of my copy editor; being such a coward, I can’t help respecting Leonard’s grammatical bravery. 

It's been a long time since I read him, so help me out here Elmore Leonard fans: I think I get the notion of 'narrative acceleration' and that sounds like a good description of Leonard's writing. But does he somehow omit pronouns and helping verbs in ways that English speakers don't?

May just have to read that book …

http://www.americandialect.org/

The American Dialect Society has finished a major webpage update, here. Might be worth calling attention to the student membership and there's a nice plug for the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Check it out.

Slab-Z: More DARE in the news

Yup, that's the range of the alphabet covered in the last volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Joan Hall, who's leading the charge on to Z, has an excellent piece in the new Newsweek, which you can read here. She alludes at the end to the already-anticipated electronic version.

I'm holding my breath already.

Snapshot of US/Canadian English

I'm a little alarmed to see that I haven't posted yet on this project, on differences between Canadian and US English.

This is a very interesting project by Claire Bowern and Alan Munn. One of the big innovations is that they are making recordings over the internet. (You need a mic on your computer to do it — as they point out, if you can use Skype, you can do this.)

Especially Wisconsin readers would be good to have, I imagine, given the popular perception that Wisconsinites sound 'Canadian'. Mr. V says, do it!