'The Offendings of the Millions'

My youngest son this summer is working as an intern with a Houston law firm and one of the partners loaned him a copy of The Regional Vocabulary of Texas (University of Texas Press, 1962) by E. Bagby Atwood, whose foreword begins: 

“The present study deals with a vocabulary which, although still in use, is to a great extent obsolescent. Many regional words reflect an era of the not-too-distant past when most citizens were rural, or at least knew something of rural life.”

 

Atwood was a professor of linguistics and philology who taught at the University of Texas at Austin. For this native Northerner, his lists of words mingle the familiar with the exotic. For instance, lagniappe is a word I have never heard spoken and originally encountered years ago in Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883):

 

"We picked up one excellent word – a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word – ‘Lagniappe.’ They pronounce it lanny-yap . . . When a child or a servant buys something in a shop – or even the mayor or governor, for aught I know – he finishes the operation by saying, – ‘Give me something for lagniappe.’ The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of liquorice-root.”

 

I think of the phrase “baker’s dozen.” Atwood writes of the word: “There is no doubt that, as the major dictionaries state, lagniappe is a gallicized version of the Spanish la ñapa [a little extra] . . .”

 

Another word I’ve never heard someone use in conversation but knew from print is hant or haint, variations on haunt. Southerners use it as a noun meaning ghost and I think I first found it in one of Faulkner’s novels. I encountered some of Atwood’s words in dialogue from old Western movies. Draw, for instance, a noun meaning a dry creek bed or arroyo; hoosegow, meaning a jail, from the Spanish juzgado, a courthouse; tote used as a verb meaning to carry, and tow sack, meaning a “big burlap sack,” which reminds me of its usage as a related noun in Louisiana-born Tony Joe White’s song “Polk Salad Annie” (1968):

 

“Now, everyday ’fore supper time

She’ go down by the truck patch

And pick her a mess o’ Polk salad

And carry it home in a tote sack.”

 

Other novelties: mott, meaning “a clump of trees”’; shinnery (sounds like an Irish surname), “oak-covered land”; olla, from the Spanish, meaning a “large crock for water”; smearcase, from the German meaning “homemade curd cheese”; and cush-cush, “corn meal preparation.” I especially like shivaree, a “burlesque serenade . . . associated with re-marriage,” and mosquito hawk or snake doctor for “dragon fly.” Blinky means “beginning to turn sour (milk).”

 

Our language has grown increasingly homogenous since Bagby published his study. Television and the internet have flattened things out, culled regionalisms, made American English more universal, less colorful. He reminds us that language percolates from the bottom up, socially speaking. So much of the language Atwood documents is vivid and colorful to contemporary ears. As H.L. Mencken writes in The American Language (1919):    

 

“What are of more importance, to those interested in language as a living thing, are the offendings of the millions who are not conscious of any wrong. It is among these millions, ignorant of regulation and eager only to express their ideas clearly and forcefully, that language undergoes its great changes and constantly renews its vitality. These are the genuine makers of grammar, marching miles ahead of the formal grammarians. . . .The ignorant, the rebellious and the daring come forward with their brilliant barbarisms; the learned and conservative bring up their objections.”