DARE fights on!!! And mangoes

Need some good news? Then check out this story. The Dictionary of American Regional English is STILL surviving for now. I mean, it's to the point of funding for a few months driven by a GoFundMe campaign, but as our University is being plowed under and the field we've grown in is being salted, I take real inspiration in a small unit that is still alive on the softest of soft money.

If you can, PLEASE help them out. Do what you gotta do: check the couch cushions for change, sell some plasma and pawn your banjo. Just help these people out.

And as it happened, a member of Team Verb just reported by email that he'd had a discussion this weekend with somebody about the use of 'mango' for 'green pepper, bell pepper' in Ohio. DARE, of course, has the answer: The term is actually used for a whole set of kinds of peppers, and apparently tied to pickled versions of them at some point: "the East Indian mango (Mangifera indica) was at first known only as a pickle; the “mangoes” illustrated here were made in imitation of that imported delicacy". How cool is that?

See the DARE map below.

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!

DARE digital now available!!!!

The subject says it all. Check here.

DARE, safe for the moment

You've seen the news by now — anywhere from the Log to the local news —that the Dictionary of American Regional English has secured enough funding to keep going. The good news actually trickled in over a couple of weeks but it's all come together now. A lot of people on campus, in the American Dialect Society and in the broader community of linguists and lexicographers and friends of DARE stepped up big here.

But keep sending them money! (There's a 'donate' link on the site.) Add a zero to the DARE gift you put in your will. Or two zeroes.

The Dictionary of American Regional English needs your help. It's serious.

Here's a line you should never, ever read in the paper:

Editor Joan Houston Hall said she’s issued layoff notices, effective July 1, to the staff of the respected dictionary, which includes more than 60,000 words compiled by UW-Madison researchers during the past 48 years.

A funding crunch — Hall figures it will take $250,000 to keep the same staff through the end of the year — has hit just as the dictionary embarks on its digital future, sending Hall into a frenzied push for new grant money and staffers into a panicked state that could cause them to reach for a whoopensocker.

The only-in-Wisconsin word means “something extraordinary of its kind, especially a large or strong drink.”

It's now or never. You can go here to donate: http://dare.wisc.edu/.