Vanishing Words

I just happened to see a column in the Powell Valley News about some endangered phrases the author's elders used to use. Part of our hillbilly dialect that outsiders never got quite right, because the point was that, before radio and television, people talked the way their elders did and there was not necessarily one consistent pattern of "dialect" even for an individual town. Which of these things, Steve Roark asked, have readers heard someone say? Do we ever  use any of them nowadays?

1. "Daub" for a quantity, probably in between a dab and a blob, of something daubed onto something else with a knife, like butter or jelly. "I like a daub of jelly on a biscuit." I've heard it, but not thought of it as regional, just as a word that sounds somewhere in between dab and blob, all of which are smaller than a glob. 

2. "The devil of" something: Possibly related to the Irish use of "devil of..." to mean "never a bit of...," but more often used to mean "a difficult," or even "a large." Heard on a record by Ralph and Carter Stanley where they told old jokes: "I don't know how to get to Little Rock, but there's a devil of a big rock down in Pap's old pasture." (Note that this was a comedy routine with men from Virginia making fun of people in Arkansas...but yes, I heard people say "the devil of" in that sense in casual conversation.) "I had the devil of a time trying to finish the project on the computer with all the Microsoft 'updates'." 

Also heard: "a devil's washboard," meaning a rough road. The Devil's Bathtub, a deep round pool in a mountain stream, was named before the Gate City Blue Devils but, so far as I know, it's a unique place name rather than a generic phrase.

"Blue devils" was an old slang phrase for alarm and despondency in the nineteenth century. Since all slang references to the Devil were classified as profanity, "blue devils" was politely abbreviated to "the blues," which then got to be the term for a genre of music felt to express that sort of mood. Then in the World Wars, first a French and then a Canadian military group were nicknamed "Blue Devils." Duke University's team was nicknamed in their honor and several high school teams wanted to be nicknamed by association with Duke University.

"The devils' own" (whatever) is extremely difficult and disagreeable, something that seems as if it were invented to torment human beings.

3. "Dew poisoning": Nobody I knew ever used this phrase seriously. Water-borne bacteria can cause infections and an infected skin would on the foot was blamed on walking through heavy dew. "Mountain Dew poisoning" would be a clever phrase for hypercaffeination or for the effects of drinking home-brewed alcohol, but it's not in general use in either sense. 

4. "Dinner" for the midday meal: Still used, though I've heard it explained in elitist terms that "dinner" meant the main meal, farm laborers ate their dinners at midday, while landowners and the bourgeoisie at their dinners after the day's work. In practice I think people say "breakfast, dinner, and supper" or "breakfast, lunch, and dinner" according to which their elders said. The job status thing may or may not be reliably correlated with the word usage.

5. "Dinner on the ground": a picnic. Roark associated it with Decoration/Memorial Day. I've heard it associated with summer "camp meetings" where members of various churches used to take up to a week of vacation time in or near woods, praying, studying the Bible, singing, catechizing converts, and mainly keeping cool during what was expected to be the worst heat wave of the summer. "All-day meeting with dinner on the ground." The original idea was that the meal was brought out in a hamper and set on a tablecloth, or sheet or blanket or whatever people had, spread on the grass, and people sat around the cloth to eat. "Dinner on the grounds," carried out from a restaurant or served from a vehicle or vehicles, eaten on the chairs or bleachers available, is more often seen and heard these days but it's a variant.

6. "Disgust-es" for "disgusts": Yes, some people make a point of enunciating the "sts" combination in this way. If something disgust-es you, is it more disgusting than something that merely disgusts you? I don't know; people I know don't make this distinction.

7. "Done" for "already" or "completely": I think all of my elders used this one, especially (with a hint that the phrase had once been considered funny) "They'd done done it." "I've done finished it." 

A variant form, also apparently considered funny at one time, was "He'd done'ready done it."

8. "Dog" or "dogged" used as a less offensive substitute for "damn/ed": Even my oldest elders thought of this as an outdated phrase most likely to be put in the mouths of fictional comic characters. Mark Twain's characters say "dog my cats!" and no doubt some people in the mid-nineteenth century really did. I grew up saying "darn/ed." I've felt funny about saying things like "that darned commercial" ever since I said it in front of a child I used to baby-sit, and the child repeated it in the presence of its mother, a church lady, who didn't dare to scold me (I didn't go to their church so couldn't be expected to know anything) but got up and spanked the child. (And anyway, darning is mending and ought to be used in reference to things that are worth preserving.) On the blog I say "dang," and, in contexts where it really is the proper usage, "not worth a daam"--the coin that was worth less than the cost of making it. In real life, before becoming an aunt, I sometimes said "damn/ed," but not often.

9. "Doins," "doings": Technically includes all the things people might have been doing, but used especially of a gathering. I've heard this one, less often over the years.

10. "Dope" for soda pop: Several older neighbors used to say this. It referred to the fact that the original formula for Coca-Cola included a bit of cocaine, which the company says hasn't been used since the 1890s. "Dope" then came to be used to mean an addict, or any stupid person ("The boys/girls at my school are a bunch of dopes"), and "Coke" came into use, probably peaking before I was born, to mean any soda pop. When a character in a 1950s novel went to the drugstore with friends or a date for "cokes" some of them were probably sipping Sprite or Grapette. 

11. "Drag up" or "draw up" a chair to join a group: More likely to be expressed as "take a seat" or "get (oneself) a chair," but not unknown. Probably less common because public gatherings are less likely to take place in a large room with folding chairs leaned against the wall, taken out and unfolded as people come in.

12. "Draw out" for "remove the infection": Less common because the treatment is less common.  A poultice containing a topical antiseptic, or something people hoped would work like one, was applied to an infected skin wound before injections of antivenin, antibiotics, or antihistamines became available.

13. "Dreamt" for "dreamed": Used when people want to sound quaint. Up into the nineteenth century we find some authors writing "he dreamed" but "she had dreamt," and others using "dreamt" as both simple past and past participle. "Dreamed" became more fashionable about a hundred years ago and used to be one of those words that identified people who were and were not following linguistic trends.

14. "Dreckly" for "directly," but used ironically in the sense of "at some unspecified future time, not necessarily in this year," in contexts like "I'll oil that squeaking hinge directly." Some people may have been more likely to mean "directly" in the original sense that they were moving in the direction of doing whatever-it-was when they said "di-rect-ly" instead of "dreckly," but this is uncertain. Many people who were attracted to this use of "directly" seemed to me to be procrastinators in any case.

15. "Druther" for "would rather": This was a status indicator but I'm not altogether certain how it worked. Generally the less educated said "ruther," those calling attention to their education said "rah-ther," but I'm not sure whether it was the middle class, the real flat-heeled aristocrats, or both who traditionally said "rather" like "lather." (One of my fence-sitting habits is alternating between saying "rather" like "father" and like "lather.") 

"Had one's druthers," meaning "had one's first choice," is sometimes found in written English and was sometimes used by my elders. 

16. "Dull as a froe": I've never heard this. I've never heard "froe" used in casual conversation. It was a tool used to split wood. Roark explains that it was traditionally dull-edged. My elders split wood with an axe, hax, hatchet, sometimes a chisel; they didn't have the specific old-time tools called froes. I did know that a froe was an old-time tool, but not one my elders used or talked about.

Both "froe," the tool, and "fro" meaning "from," were used before a curly hair style was called an "Afro" or 'fro." 

17. "Dusky dark": for dusky, crepuscular, twilight, gloaming, the time between sunset and dark; if people I knew used this they probably thought they were quoting a poetic phrase. About a hundred years ago there were a lot of songs sentimentalizing this time of day, the time when sweethearts were allowed a good-night kiss if they made it reasonably quick. My elders knew and sang a lot of those songs but their everyday word for this time of day was probably either "sunset" or "getting dark."