How to speak American
Don’t let that slick salesman honeyfuggle you, since a fancy bombazine will never hold up in this toad-strangler. Say what? Well, it’s certainly English, but few people these days refer to deceitful flattery as honeyfuggle. And unless you’re from Baltimore, you might not know that a bombazine is an umbrella, and only those from the Gulf region would call a sudden, heavy rainstorm a toad-strangler. Just as in England the mother tongue sometimes bears little resemblance to what is spoken in the United States, the provincial vocabularies and dialects of America’s small towns and big cities can sometimes sound like foreign languages to the uninitiated. Cataloging, decoding, and preserving the colorful idioms and terms used by regular folks before they’re lost to history, the “Dictionary of American Regional English” (DARE) is an acclaimed scholarly text widely referenced by everyone from teachers and librarians to forensic linguists and oral historians. DARE, a project that took nearly...