Editrix

I Want to Be on the Usage Panel When I Grow Up

You know how the American Heritage mentions a “Usage Panel” in some of its usage notes? Take, for example, this one, tacked to the end of epithet’s definition:

 

Strictly speaking, an epithet need not be derogatory, but the term is commonly used as a simple synonym for term of abuse or slur, as in There is no place for racial epithets in a police officer’s vocabulary. This usage is accepted by 80 percent of the Usage Panel.

 

I’d never given much thought to who exactly constitutes the Usage Panel, but yesterday, one of my co-workers directed me to page xv of the American Heritage:

 

We regret that the following members of the Usage Panel, who participated in the program for this edition, have died:

 

Next comes a surprisingly extensive list, which includes Isaac Asimov, Susan Sontag, and Eudora Welty.

 

Only after reading that did I realize all of the members of the Usage Panel are listed in this section of the front matter. (I’m not sure why I never noticed before. I’m kind of dumb.) Here are some names that jumped out at me:

 

Diane Ackerman, whose book, A Natural History of Love, kept me turning pages late into the night when I was a junior in high school. I remember being bewildered by a reference to girls wrapping their hair around tin cans before they went to bed at night.

 

Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is—I’m proud to say—from West Virginia, and whose book, Colored People: A Memoir, is on my reading list. (I’ve borrowed it from Mr. K—. Book borrowing may be my favorite perk of marriage.) Speaking of hairdos, Colored People includes a long, fascinating description of “the process.”

 

Alice Munro, whom Sara Pritchard turned me on to just a few years ago.

 

Cynthia Ozick, whose The Pagan Rabbi and Other Short Stories I’d really like to get my hands on.

 

Barbara Wallraff, whose book, Word Court, is what triggered my love of grammar.

 

There are, of course, many, many more notables on the Usage Panel. So, if you have some time on your hands, and the American Heritage is nearby, flip to page xiii.

To "G" or Not to "G" (Updated)

As you can tell from my “What Editrix Is Reading Now” widget, I’m making my way through Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy by Victoria Purcell-Gates. So far, I’m digging the book, but I have one small complaint.

Below is an excerpt from the first chapter. It’s how the author recounts what Jenny, an illiterate woman living in urban Appalachia, said to her in conversation:

We was goin’ down, and there was a rattlesnake! You know, we didn’t get to it right then. The others, they was flyin’ away, goofin’ off, but Charles didn’t ’cause we had the baby on with us. And they kept motionin’ for us to back up, and Charles said “What for?”

Now, I have no problem with re-creating people’s speech as accurately as possible, particularly when their literacy, level of education, and mastery of language are topics of discussion. But the g-dropping, as rendered here, irks me. I can think of three reasons for my being irritated:

1)      I’ve lived in many places, among people of many backgrounds and with many levels of education, and I’ve always heard people drop their g’s. Since g-dropping is widespread, since we’re already shown that Jenny makes subject-verb agreement errors (“we was goin’ down,” “they was flyin’ away”), and since “’cause” is enough to clue us in to Jenny’s accent, ginning up her speech with dropped g’s seems like overkill.

2)      The dropped g’s make the text harder to read, particularly in long passages, such as the one I lifted my quote from. Every time my eye gets to an apostrophe, it’s surprised anew, as if each apostrophe were a goldfish that kerplopped to the surface of a pond.

3)      I’m overly sensitive to cartoonish portrayals of Appalachians. (See this and this.)

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m probably overreacting. I should also point out that I have taken absolutely zero linguistics classes and am basing my assumptions solely on my personal experience. So, if anyone would like to set me straight, please do. But  I still think portraying the text this way would have been easier on the reader while remaining faithful to the rhythm of Jenny’s speech:

We was going down, and there was a rattlesnake! You know, we didn’t get to it right then. The others, they was flying away, goofing off, but Charles didn’t ’cause we had the baby on with us. And they kept motioning for us to back up, and Charles said “What for?”

Update (January 21, 2009): Not only are the g’s dropped from Jenny's speech, but so many exclamation points are used that one would think she's always shouting:

I love it, you know, goin’ jeep ridin’ and four-wheelin’! (24)

That’s the way I was brought up! (26)

Nobody took my lunch money! (35)

But I never would’a thought to turn [the postcard] over to see some writin’ to me! (59)

West Virginia's "Apostrophe Catastrophe"

One of these days, West Virginia is going to be in the spotlight for a positive reason (i.e., something besides poverty, corrupt politicians, and tooth loss). Unfortunately, today isn't that day.

West Virginia Can't Catch a Break

At The Editor's Desk, Andy Bechtel has pointed out this groan-worthy sentence, taken from a News and Observer sports blog:

In 2002, West Virginia lost to West Virginia as the bowl debuted in Charlotte with a sellout crowd.

The error has since been corrected. The sentence now reads, "West Virginia lost to Virginia," which is all well and good, and I feel bad for the poor author or copy editor who didn't catch the mistake the first time around. But the typo still has me feeling down. When you're a native West Virginian, as am I, and you find yourself in another state, eventually someone is going to ask you where you're from. And the conversation often goes something like this:

Stranger No. 1: So, where are you from?

West Virginian: I'm originally from West Virginia.

Stranger No. 1: Really? My brother lives in Richmond. What a coincidence.

West Virginian: Well, I live in West Virginia. Richmond's in Virginia.

Stranger No. 1: Oh, right.

Stranger No. 2 [Approaches]: Hi, I don't think we've met.

Stranger No. 1: I'm Stan, and this is Stacey. Stacey's from Virginia.

Stranger No. 2: Wow, Virginia, huh? You're a long way from home.

Why did it have to be Virginia? Why?!

I Would Totally Get Along with Tom McCoy

As many (or most) of you may know by now, Studs Terkel died last week. I've been a huge fan of his work ever since I read Hard Times. (If you're a West Virginian, you must read Hard Times, if only for the descriptions of West Virginia coal miners during the Great Depression.)

In his book Working, he recorded how people felt about their jobs, including a twenty-three-year-old proofreader named Tom McCoy, who worked for a magazine. You can read the whole passage here, but here's my favorite bit:

If there's a lull in the work, the kids'll go in the main office, which is plush, where the big boss works -- and they'd sleep on the couches. The big boss complained to my boss that people were sleeping on the couches on Saturdays. He asked me if I would pass the word along not to sleep on the couches any longer. I said, "Why? It doesn't make any sense. If there's nothing to do and it's the middle of the night and people want to grab a nap and the couch is there . . ." He said, "Well, that's what the boss said." I just told him, "No, I wouldn't feel right telling them. You'll have to tell them yourself." It's really stupid. If the couch is there and somebody's tired, he should lay down on the floor and keep this guy's couch neat for Monday?

English-Major Monday: Paul Newman

Pauly, Pauly, Pauly. What is there to say? He was hot as a young convict. He was hot as an old Irish mobster. There’s no way around it: Paul Newman was hot.

Mr. Newman was an economics major at Kenyon College before he switched to English and speech. While he was an undergrad, he spent his summers doing stock theater. After he graduated (or “was graduated,” depending on your persuasion) in 1946, he went on to study drama at Yale.

Apparently, Mr. Newman was initially hesitant to leave New York for Hollywood. “Too close to the cake,” he is quoted as saying. “Also, no place to study.”

As a West Virginian, I have a particular fondness for Cool Hand Luke, which Mr. Newman made in 1967, because he came to Huntington, West Virginia, to pick up the Appalachian accent he used in the film. (West Virginia Public Broadcasting did an interesting piece on his visit. You can listen to it here.) As a queer woman, I love that he supported same-sex marriage. And as a proud liberal, I love that he made it onto Richard Nixon’s enemies list because of his “[r]adic-lib causes” and “[h]eavy [Eugene] McCarthy involvement [in] ’68.” He even wore a McGovern pin when he was on the cover of Life magazine (pictured at right), which makes me think he would have been all over Barack Obama. Wait, let me google that . . . Yup. I was right. He donated $4,600 to him during the primary race. However, he also donated $4,600 to Hilary Clinton during the primaries -- and $2,300 to Bill Richardson. You know, I think that only makes him hotter.

But I think the absolute hottest thing about Mr. Newman is that his Newman’s Own Foundation has donated over $250 million to charities worldwide. Salad-dressing labels have never seemed so sexy.

   

P.S.: Check out this screen test Mr. Newman did with James Dean. [Fans self with collar] Geez, who turned up the thermostat in here?

 

Read about more famous English majors.

Hey Is for Horses (Part 2)

To read part 1 of this series, click here. To see the Betty Boop cartoon that inspired it, click here.

Kirk Hazen, an English professor at West Virginia University and the director of the West Virginia Dialect Project, has faxed me a copy of the entry for hey in the Dictionary of American Regional English, volume 2. Because the book costs ninety bucks (used!), I feel only minimally guilty for posting this rather lengthy excerpt from it (if you're a typical reader of online material, I suggest skipping down to the colorful graphs I whipped up):

hey exclam

1 also in combs: Used as a greeting. chiefly Sth [Southern], Lower Missip [Mississippi] Valley See Map

1901 DN 2.142 seNY [southeastern New York], Hey wat. . . Hello. 1930 DN 6.81cSC [central South Carolina], Hey, the usual informal greeting between social equals. . . probably fairly general in the south. 1944 PADS 2.9 AL [Alabama], VA [Virginia], NC [North Carolina], Hey. . . The common term of familiar salutation of children and young people in most of the South; hello seems to them either semiformal or archaic. On many Northern and Western campuses the term is hi. 1956 McAtee Some Dialect NC [North Carolina] 22, Hey: . . informal greeting. 1960 (1962) Lee Mockingbird [To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee] 156 AL [Alabama], "Tell him hey for me, won't you?" . . "I'll tell him you said hey." 1965-70 DARE [Dictionary of Regional English] (Qu. [Quote] NN10a, Expressions . . used when you meet somebody you know quite well) 60 Infs, chiefly Sth [Southern], Lower Missip [Mississippi] Valley, Hey; 9 Infs, chiefly Sth [Southern], Hey there; DC [Washington, DC] 11, FL [Florida] 52, IL [Illinois] 115, TN [Tennessee] 46, Hey baby (or broz, buddy, chile, man); IL [Illinois] 119, SC (South Carolina) 8, Hey, how you (doing); NC (North Carolina) 52, Hey (name), how are you; SC [South Carolina], 21, Hey-hey; SC [South Carolina] 34, Hey, how're you; OH [Ohio] 103, Hey what's happening; (Qu. [Quote] II 12, Talking about meeting somebody on the street and speaking only a few words with him: "We just _____.") Infs FL [Florida] 18, NY [New York] 238, Said hey (ya); (Qu. [Quote] NN 10b, Greetings used when you meet somebody you do not know well) Infs GA [Georgia] 72, PA [Pennsylvania] 66, VA [Virginia] 85, Hey (there). 1966 Barnes-Jensen Dict. UT Slang 23, Hey there . . words of greeting. 1971 Today Show Letters Sth (Southern), In the North, what is hi to us is hey to a Southerner's vocabulary. 1979 McCalls 106.7.129 New Orleans LA, Say 'hey' to Dixie.

I looked at the map mentioned at the beginning of the entry. It looks like something a drunk person scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin. I spent five minutes trying to differentiate Michigan from Wisconsin before I gave up. Suffice it to say, dots are more prevalent in the South than anywhere else.

It's probably worth noting that this volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English was published in 1991. Maybe hey has spread since then. The completely unscientific poll I posted on this site seems to suggest so.

So far, the results (shown below) indicate that hey is far more popular than hi in the South. No surprise there. However, I was surprised to see that the same holds true in other regions of the country (though by a much smaller margin).

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Hey Is for Horses (Part 1)

When I moved from West Virginia to Florida—at the tender, giggly, Debbie Gibson-loving age of nine—I stopped saying hi and started saying hey. It didn't happen instantly, of course, but all of my new friends said hey, and all of my teachers said hey, and when our new parrot said his first word, it was a ghostly-sounding, drawn-out hey. How else could things have turned out?

Now that I've moved back to West Virginia (Morgantown, to be exact), I don't hear hey as often. I don't think anyone would look at me cross-eyed if I said, "Hey, how are you?" instead of "Hi, how are you?" but I definitely get greeted with hi more often than with hey. Is my experience part of a trend? Is hey really a southern thing?

According to a usage note in the American Heritage, the answer is yes . . . kind of. In the 1960s, hey was confined to Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida (a-ha!), Georgia, and the Carolinas. Since then, it has spread througout the United States.

Pain in the English's post on the subject—particularly the comment thread it generated—concurs. (Hell, it even quotes the American Heritage usage note.) As one reader wrote, "This used to be a Southern thing - it has spread, which makes me kind of sad, as I miss being made fun of for it by my relatives in Kansas."

OK, so hey is southern in the way that pecan pie is southern: everyone touts its southerliness even as it's popping up in restaurants all over the country. But when it comes to the hey-hi war, what side is West Virginia on? After all, depending on whom you talk to, West Virginia is a southern state, a northern state, or not a state of all ("I'm from West Virginia." "Really? My cousin's from Richmond. Small world!").

Kirk Hazen is an English professor at West Virginia University and the director of the West Virginia Dialect Project, and he's been interested in hey for some time now. He thinks hey is used more frequently in rural areas of West Virginia than in urban areas. He also thinks it becomes more common as you travel southward in the state.

Since Morgantown is a relatively urban city located in northern West Virginia, it should come as no surprise that hi and hey mingle here. However, that mingling isn't always without friction. Sometimes, it's more like the mambo scene in West Side Story. As Dr. Hazen says, hey and hi (and, for that matter, hello and s'up):

will have different social values in different regions and for different social classes in those regions. In the Southern U.S., hey is the norm for most. At Clemson University (at least back in the late 1980s and early 1990s), s'up was the norm. For Morgantown, I suspect that there is quite a mixture since we have folk from all over. [Editrix's note: It's a college town.] My wife is from North Carolina and grew up with hey. Here she uses both hi and hey, but when she uses hi with her family in North Carolina, she gets criticized.

For his part, Dr. Hazen became accustomed to hey during his years in the Carolinas, even though he grew up outside of Detroit, where hi is the "it" greeting. Last spring, a New Jerseyan (the parent of one of his students) greatly objected to Dr. Hazen's use of hey in an e-mail salutation. "Supposedly," said Dr. Hazen, "[the parent] took it as too informal . . . and not at all professional." [Editrix's note: I have it on good authority that the Redoutable Mr. K—— is in the anti-hey camp. Where's Mr. K—— from? New Jersey.]

More on this subject later.

P.S.: I hope you got a chance to see the Betty Boop cartoon I posted last week. I have three things to say about it: (1) I love when the guys sing, "Hey! Hey!" and a box of hay appears for the horses to eat. (2) As a West Virginian, should I feel offended that this cartoon makes coal mining look like a trip to an amusement park? (3) The band leader—shown in the beginning—is a West Virginian, too. I wonder if he said hey?

Hint, Hint

I'm piecing together a post that won't be ready until Monday. In the meantime, please enjoy this cartoon, which inspired it:

My So-Called Ignorance

Today, in his Los Angeles Times blog, Don Frederick discusses the Kentucky primary, which—as you surely know by now—Clinton won big. The post itself isn't what provoked my ire. It's this comment, left by EddienTexas:

Let the Republicans have the snake handlers and inbreeds and ignorance that goes with those so called uneducated WV and Kentucky voters.

Look at the way they live and look at the way they have voted locally. They cant govern themselves but America depends on their judgement to choose a candidate to lead all of us.

It is time to put these "Regan Democrats"(whatever that really means) into history with Jessica Lynch!!!!!!

EddienTexas is right. We West Virginians and Kentuckians are, indeed, so ignorant that we would go around picking up snakes and screwing our cousins. Who knows what terror would be unleashed on the world if we tried to correctly hyphenate terms, use abbreviations consistently, navigate the thorny path of subject-verb agreement, abstain from exclamation-point abuse, remember that compound sentences take commas and that contractions take apostrophes, put spaces before open parentheses, and spell Ronald Reagan's name right? Given our incurable illiteracy, if we tried to tackle all of that, we'd probably resort to our ruffian ways—engaging in feuds and terrorizing canoers and turning over cars with Obama stickers on them.

At least EddienTexas takes pity on us hillfolk by insinutating that, despite our handling of snakes and our acceptance of inbreeding, we really do have some level of education ("those so called uneducated WV and Kentucky voters"). Thank you so much, EddienTexas. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I can skin a coon and shoot a possum and make myself a pipe out of a little ol' corncob. If that's not education, I don't know what is.

And, as if that's not kind enough, EddienTexas even hopes we'll go down in history as patriots. Aw, shucks, EddienTexas. You sure can make this country girl blush!