A testimonial to the metaphor-making power of the American language at its most vigorous. -- Newsweek The Dictionary of American Regional English...is all we had hoped for and more. It includes the regional and folk language, past and present, of the old and the young, men and women, white and black, the rural and the urban, from all walks of life... This is an exciting, lasting work of useful scholarship accomplished with excellence, a work that scholars and laypeople alike will study, use and enjoy for generations. -- Stuart B. Flexner, New York Times Book Review Unmatched as a kind of refuge for colloquialisms threatened with extinction...Writers, etymologists and other devotees of verbal arcana have never been given a richer browsing ground. -- Ezra Bowden, Time The Dictionary will rank as one of the glories of contemporary American scholarship...it is endlessly rewarding to dip into, and if you look up a particular word or phrase you are in constant danger of being seduced to something else...It is a work to consult, and a work to savor-a work to last a lifetime. -- John Gross, New York Times DARE is evidence that American speech will never become stale and fusty, that the great linguistic homogenization of television is a myth. -- Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun Times To open its pages is to thrill at the exploration of the New World and to trace the course of American history through its language... Its editors... have caught the native poetry of America on every page. -- Smithsonian The Dictionary of American Regional English is an essential resource for the English language and its rich expression in America. From Mark Twain to William Faulkner, our great writers have anchored their work in regional English with its deep ties to the places in which Americans live. With the publication of this magnificent volume, we can now fully understand and embrace the voice of our nation. -- William Ferris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill This is a monumental achievement, nothing less than a comprehensive account of the ever-expanding ways we talk to each other. Up above, Noah Webster and Mark Twain are smiling. -- Joseph J. Ellis, Mount Holyoke College
Joan Houston Hall is Distinguished Scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She joined the DARE staff in 1975, became Associate Editor in 1979, and was named Chief Editor in 2000.
A testimonial to the metaphor-making power of the American language
at its most vigorous.
*Newsweek*
The Dictionary of American Regional English...is all we had hoped
for and more. It includes the regional and folk language, past and
present, of the old and the young, men and women, white and black,
the rural and the urban, from all walks of life... This is an
exciting, lasting work of useful scholarship accomplished with
excellence, a work that scholars and laypeople alike will study,
use and enjoy for generations.
*Stuart B. Flexner, New York Times Book Review*
Unmatched as a kind of refuge for colloquialisms threatened with
extinction...Writers, etymologists and other devotees of verbal
arcana have never been given a richer browsing ground.
*Ezra Bowden, Time*
The Dictionary will rank as one of the glories of contemporary
American scholarship...it is endlessly rewarding to dip into, and
if you look up a particular word or phrase you are in constant
danger of being seduced to something else...It is a work to
consult, and a work to savor—a work to last a lifetime.
*John Gross, New York Times*
DARE is evidence that American speech will never become stale and
fusty, that the great linguistic homogenization of television is a
myth.
*Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun Times*
To open its pages is to thrill at the exploration of the New World
and to trace the course of American history through its language...
Its editors… have caught the native poetry of America on every
page.
*Smithsonian*
The Dictionary of American Regional English is an essential
resource for the English language and its rich expression in
America. From Mark Twain to William Faulkner, our great writers
have anchored their work in regional English with its deep ties to
the places in which Americans live. With the publication of this
magnificent volume, we can now fully understand and embrace the
voice of our nation.
*William Ferris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill*
This is a monumental achievement, nothing less than a comprehensive
account of the ever-expanding ways we talk to each other. Up above,
Noah Webster and Mark Twain are smiling.
*Joseph J. Ellis, Mount Holyoke College*
For scholars of American English, this volume and the series it
completes are a hoard of riches, and also a work of heroic
proportions for more than four decades...For the non-specialist
reader...browsing is an endless delight...What strikes one
repeatedly is the variety, the creativity, and the colorfulness of
the American English. This final volume alone has more than 1,200
double-column pages, and every one I have looked at so far has some
fresh piece of information (sushi has been known in American
English since 1894) or evocative term (swing-dingle, a shoulder
yoke for carrying two buckets). This volume, this project is more
than a mere reference for looking up obscure terms. It is a
repository of who we have been as a people, and who we are.
*Baltimore Sun blog*
The Dictionary of American Regional English, covers regional and
local speech for the whole United States: It is the treasure-house
for the all-American word hoard...Touring the Dictionary of
American Regional English is a road trip of the mind from sea to
shining sea...Its approach has been unusually adventurous. It
speaks with authority about American regional speech and has also
captured the popular imagination. It is a peerless resource for
scholars, but at the same time delivers accurate information about
regional vocabulary to laypersons who, until DARE, could not count
on access to it. In the twentieth century, DARE was so far ahead of
practices in both dialectology and lexicography that it sometimes
seemed futuristic...DARE entries have a homespun texture, demanding
more of a reader, who must reconcile various types of information
in order to understand what DARE has to say about a word or phrase.
But if they pay attention, readers come away marvelously
informed...DARE is a bold synthesis of linguistic atlas and
historical dictionary...Scholars of American language, history, and
culture will rely on it, and they will enjoy it as much as lay
readers. DARE teaches us about American regional speech, of course.
It also teaches us to think big, put aside assumptions, draw on
traditions when useful, and make things new.
*Humanities*
To scholars and language lovers [the Dictionary of American
Regional English] is an invaluable guide to the way Americans not
only speak but also live--a homegrown answer to the Oxford English
Dictionary...From the beginning the dictionary was the product of
cutting-edge lexicographical science and on-the-ground research of
unprecedented scope...Over the years DARE has been consulted by
Broadway dialect coaches, detectives analyzing ransom notes,
scholars puzzling over a Eudora Welty reference to "piecing" (that
is, snacking) and poets looking to mine its 170-plus synonyms for
dust bunnies.
*New York Times*
If you're the kind of person who is delighted to stumble across one
strange new word in a book, you may find reading this enormous
volume to be an almost excessive pleasure...The Dictionary is a
book you can actually sit down and read--not just for colorful
words and quotations, but also for a tour of actions, objects,
creatures and categories central to far-off or vanished pockets of
American life...Without your own team of roaming lexicographers,
there is probably no easier way to browse America's past ways of
living and talking than to read its books. But Dictionary of
American Regional English gathers all these terms into one place,
together with samples of the voices and stories and songs that gave
rise to them. It's the rare American book whose roots extend not
just to one region but to all of them.
*NPR.org*
DARE devotes as little space as possible to standard words with
standard meanings. It doesn't cover "technical, scientific, or
other learned words or phrases." Nor does it take any particular
interest in the kinds of words that appear in dictionaries of slang
or on Urbandictionary.com. What's left? A vast, meticulously
researched and organized compilation of the nonstandard words,
spellings, and pronunciations that dictionaries generally leave
out--American regional English... The DARE alphabet is at last
complete. Now forensic linguists can look up zaguan ("A vestibule;
a porch"). Environmental lawyers can look up zanjero ("The people
who take care of or open the floodgates into the ditch"). And so
can anyone who needs or wants a fuller picture of American
English.
*American Scholar*
Fifty years ago, scholars at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
set out to document the regional speech of the United States. They
interviewed people one-on-one. They read cookbooks, poems,
newspapers and novels. This week, the fifth and last volume of the
Dictionary of American Regional English was published, making it
the most exhaustive record available of American speech.
*Washington Post online*
The true value of DARE is as a record of the down-home speech of
Americans, reflecting quotidian concerns: children's games, plants
and animals, good things to eat and ways to talk about our
neighbors--the kinds of things too easily forgotten...Although we
often assume that "country practices" have fallen by the wayside
under the onslaught of pop culture, DARE provides evidence for many
terms not only of past use but of continued currency.
*Wall Street Journal*
An important event in lexicography.
*New Yorker*
"Aaron's rod" to "zydeco"--between these two verbal bookends lies
an immense and largely hidden American vocabulary, one that surely,
more than perhaps any other aspect of society, reveals the
wonderfully chaotic pluribus out of which two centuries of commerce
and convention have forged the duller reality of the unum...A
monument, a memorial, a piece of work both magisterial and majestic
that someone, somewhere, was one day bound to undertake. So to all
who take pleasure from the complex mechanics of human
communication: let us rejoice that someone did indeed undertake
this gigantic task, and recorded so fascinating a morsel of
American linguistic history.
*Lapham's Quarterly*
The native words we know for things sound right when we hear them,
reminding us who we are and where we come from. That is one more
reason to celebrate the Dictionary of American Regional English,
which reminds us that we have continued to name things long after
Adam, and which lovingly and indefatigably catalogues the words
that place us in the world.
*Baltimore Sun*
A reference tool of the finest kind.
*Down East*
DARE, as it is known, has the information you will need to bush
around (discuss) the difference between bush-busters (hillbillies)
and bush eels (rattlesnakes). One could make a sport out of
guessing the meanings of DARE entries...Every page of DARE shows
the absolute centrality of metaphor and other forms of verbal
figuration to colloquial speech. Naming storms for the damage they
do, or foods for what they do to your stomach, or foreigners for
the strange traits they exhibit--these tendencies suggest just how
much of reality is established after the fact, in conversations
about shared experience by people with a common world of
reference...Because of its reliance on and scrupulous recording of
personal testimony, DARE is one of the most poignant reference
books ever compiled, a great exploration of the far reaches and
dark corners of American cultural memory...This massive cataract of
language is enough to make one cry uncle, or calf rope, or barley
out, or I want a crab apple-or a perennial favorite, never out of
style for long: mama.
*Harper’s*
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