[etni] Dialect dictionary reaches Z
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- Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 10:15:36 +0200
What a whoopensocker! Dialect dictionary reaches Z
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Feb. 27, 2012
After almost half a century of work, thousands of interviews with
residents in every corner of America, missed deadlines and the deaths
of senior editors, the quest to complete the Madison-based Dictionary
of American Regional English has reached a successful conclusion.
They made it to Z.
Recently, the dictionary staff posed for photographs with copies of
Volume V piled around them in Stonehenge-like arrangements, smiling
"proudly with our new babies," as Editor Joan Houston Hall put it.
Launched officially in 1963, when University of Wisconsin-Madison
professor Frederic Gomes Cassidy was appointed editor, the dictionary
sought to record the nation's regional words - not the words taught by
English teachers, but the words people actually use in conversation,
from pungle and pussytoes (meaning respectively "to shell out" and
kind of "wooly herb,") to whoopensocker (a Wisconsin word meaning
"something extraordinary of its kind").
*To read the whole article, go to:
http://www.twincities.com/wisconsin/ci_20054412
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