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.

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.

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!

"Nearly 40 edible items are served on a stick"

It's State Fair time in Wisconsin, and you know what that means:

"Nearly 40 edible items are served on a stick at the Wisconsin State Fair"

Sure, we got your Chocolate-covered bacon on a stick, and your Fried peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a stick. But Cheesecake on a stick?

Full story, with pictures, here. That include the image here, by Tom Alesia. Yummers.