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.