Ear­li­er this year, we wrote about the region­al dif­fer­ences in how Amer­i­cans refer to soft drinks. An explo­ration of the var­i­ous geo­graph­i­cal names for a car­bon­at­ed bev­er­age is all well and good, but it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that America’s lex­i­cal vari­a­tions are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more col­or­ful than “soda,” (East and West coasts), “coke,” (South), and “pop” (Mid­west and North­west).

For those inter­est­ed in expe­ri­enc­ing the full range of ver­bal Amer­i­cana, the Dic­tio­nary of Amer­i­can Region­al Eng­lish (DARE) has final­ly become avail­able online after 47 years of work. Unlike any oth­er dic­tio­nary, DARE attempts to doc­u­ment the region­al aspects of Amer­i­can Eng­lish, and sys­tem­atize the wide array of  geo­graph­i­cal­ly unique terms and expres­sions. As John McWhort­er notes in The New Repub­lic, this labor of lin­guis­tic love con­tains some 60,000 entries from 1,002 com­mu­ni­ties, col­lect­ed between 1965 and 1970. Of course, as McWhort­er points out, some of the terms indexed in DARE are dat­ed, hav­ing suc­cumbed to mass-media’s democ­ra­tiz­ing effects on lan­guage over the course of DARE’s lengthy prepa­ra­tion. Still, with entries like “rich rel­a­tives” (dust bun­nies) and “Cana­di­an per­jun­kety” (pim­ples), the dic­tio­nary pro­vides a fas­ci­nat­ing glimpse of the ver­bal curios, both old and new, that have sprung up around the coun­try.

Although DARE is a sub­scrip­tion-based ser­vice, its web­site pro­vides vis­i­tors with a list of 100 free and brows­able terms. We’ve includ­ed a selec­tion below:

• “To acknowl­edge the corn – to admit to being drunk; by exten­sion, to admit to any mis­take, fault, or impro­pri­ety (for­mer­ly wide­spread, now chiefly Mid­land).”
• “Flan­nel cake – pan­cake (chiefly Appalachi­an)”
• “Flea in one’s ear – A hint, warn­ing, dis­qui­et­ing dis­clo­sure; a rebuke (chiefly North­east)”
• “Lucy Bowles – loose bow­els, diar­rhea (scat­tered, but esp. Penn­syl­va­nia, New Jer­sey, south­east­ern New York)”
• “Slick and a promise – A hasty or super­fi­cial per­for­mance of a task (chiefly New Jer­sey)”

Addi­tion­al­ly, a sam­ple of audio record­ings demon­strat­ing the breadth of accents and vocab­u­lar­ies in var­i­ous gen­er­a­tions, cities, and class­es dur­ing the ‘60s may be found on the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin-Madi­son DARE web­site.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

All things we humans use, from our advanced mobile phones to our very arms and legs, reached their cur­rent states through a process of evo­lu­tion. The same, nat­u­ral­ly, goes for our punc­tu­a­tion marks. These tools we use to sep­a­rate, con­nect, or draw atten­tion to our words and sen­tences had dif­fer­ent forms and uses in bygone times, and Scot­land-based med­ical visu­al­iza­tion soft­ware pro­gram­mer Kei­th Hous­ton has tak­en it upon him­self to trace paths through all of them. In the intro­duc­tion to his his­to­ry-of-punc­tu­a­tion blog Shady Char­ac­ters, he recounts his unlike­ly source of inspi­ra­tion in Eric Gill’s Essay on Typog­ra­phy: “my inter­est was piqued by the unusu­al char­ac­ter resem­bling a reversed cap­i­tal ‘P’ — ‘¶’ — which pep­pered the text at appar­ent­ly ran­dom inter­vals.” This lit­tle-dis­cussed mark, called a pil­crow, led Hous­ton to ask the sort of ques­tions that dri­ve his project: “How did the pilcrow’s curi­ous reverse‑P form come about? What were the roots of its pithy, half-famil­iar name? What caused it to fall out of use, and hav­ing done just that, why did Eric Gill see fit to place them seem­ing­ly at ran­dom in his only pub­lished work on typog­ra­phy? What, in oth­er words, was the pil­crow all about?”

In a recent New York­er post, Hous­ton works toward the answers by look­ing back to the pil­crow’s pre­cur­sors. “Before there was any oth­er punc­tu­a­tion there was the para­graphos—from the Greek para-, ‘beside,’ and graphein, ‘write’,” he explains. “A sim­ple hor­i­zon­tal stroke placed in the left mar­gin beside a line of text, the para­graphos was used in ancient Greece to call atten­tion to con­cep­tu­al changes in an oth­er­wise unbro­ken block of text: a new top­ic, per­haps, or a new stan­za in a poem.” This, over the cen­turies, became the pil­crow, just as “the Latin abbre­vi­a­tion ‘lb,’ for the Roman term libra pon­do, or ‘pound weight,’ ” turned into the #, or the hash mark, or — bet­ter yet —the octothor­pe. As for ☞, that lit­tle hand, Hous­ton tells us its prop­er name: man­icule, “tak­en,” nat­u­ral­ly enough, “from the Latin man­icu­lum, or ‘lit­tle hand.’ ” With ear­li­est use found in the Domes­day Book of 1086, the man­icule, “a mark that read­ers drew to call out points of inter­est,” enjoyed great preva­lence until the fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry print­ing press came along, when, “with print­ed ver­sions of the symbol—and of oth­er ref­er­ence marks such as * and †—now avail­able to writ­ers, ‘autho­rized’ notes began to spring up in the mar­gins, encroach­ing upon the space once avail­able to the read­er.”

Hous­ton’s work on the his­to­ry of punc­tu­a­tion has now tak­en the form of a book: Shady Char­ac­ters: The Secret Life of Punc­tu­a­tion, Sym­bols & Oth­er Typo­graph­i­cal Marks. But you can still read a wealth of his schol­ar­ship on the pil­crow, octothor­pe, the man­icule, and oth­er sym­bols both cur­rent and for­got­ten, on his blog, all clear­ly orga­nized on its table of con­tents. Who could turn down that good day’s read­ing‽

via The New York­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cor­mac McCarthy’s Three Punc­tu­a­tion Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.