John Houston Hall, Chief Editor, with Luanne von Schneidemesser, Senior Editor. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. 1080 pp., 1,702 maps. $90.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-6740-6653-3).
The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) would have been the project of a lifetime for a younger academic, but Frederic Cassidy, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, was late in his career when he became the Chief Editor of DARE in 1962. It is unlikely, even for a researcher with his keen eye for detail and meticulous care in every aspect of his work, that Cassidy would have guessed that the sixth and final volume of DARE would not be published for a full half-century. Nor could he have anticipated that, due to modern mass communications technologies, innovations in computing (including relational database management software, the emergence of geographic information systems [GIS] and advanced methods for spatial statistics), and culture change, the finished product is perhaps more a historical document than a living dictionary of American English usage.
The intent of DARE was to provide a comprehensive inventory of variation in English language usage across the United States, with a focus on words or expressions most commonly used to capture a particular meaning. Linguistics, phonetics, and phonology were largely left for others to explore. The raw data for DARE were collected through the use of a questionnaire (provided in its entirety on pp. 645–75), administered by field staff (primarily graduate students) in more than 1,000 communities to a total of 2,777 respondents during the summers from 1965 through 1970, with information supplemented through review of a variety of print media. The questionnaire included well into the thousands of specific questions, each with a blank that the respondent was asked to fill in with their most common usage. The range of questions is quite broad, and covers both the commonplace (“What do you call the separating area in the middle of a four-lane road?”) and situations that one might encounter less frequently (“Favorite spring tonics around here: (Open question)”) or depending on your own vernacular maybe not less frequently (“Exclamations caused by sudden pain—a blow on the thumb:”). All of this information was painstakingly collated using the technologies available at the time; one must remember that the widespread availability of fully functional relational database management software was decades in the future. Although I was not directly involved in DARE, I heard lectures about it periodically, had friends who worked on it while undergraduate or graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, and watched with interest as the volumes of the dictionary slowly appeared, beginning in the mid-1980s and culminating almost thirty years later with this volume. Readers interested in learning more about the history of DARE might wish to consult an informative web page at http://dare.wisc.edu/node/244.
DARE Volume VI is not technically a dictionary, per se. Rather, this volume provides summative material of broad general interest to users of the dictionary, and especially to researchers interested in details on results of the DARE survey, including the questionnaire used to gather the primary data and a detailed listing of the univariate results for each question. What makes this volume of more than special interest to geographers is the series of “contrastive” maps showing national patterns of words used to express specific concepts. Also included is an index that those with access to the entire DARE can use for cross-referencing. These comprehensive lists result in a volume of more than 1,000 pages.
The series of maps illustrating word usage across the United States uses cartograms based on the population of each state according to the 1960 federal census. Small filled circles represent each response; these are placed in the state where the respondent resided. I found myself studying each page with interest, having personally resided in eleven different states and having visited all but one. Some topics provide maps showing the distribution of more common usages, and others show the distribution of the use of a particular word by age, sex, race, education, and community type. To cite a few interesting examples, for the phrase “a child of unmarried parents” (p. 186) the three most common expressions were “catch colt,” “outside child,” and “woods colt,” and for “very drunk” (p. 216), “dog drunk,” “loop-legged,” “plastered,” and “skunk-drunk.” Where, the reader might ask, are these and other terms most prevalent? For that, encourage your library to add DARE to its reference collection, but I will give you a hint. “Plastered” was in common usage across the nation, whereas “dog drunk” was used almost exclusively in the Southern states. Of course, space did not permit the provision of maps for every word usage identified by survey respondents.
The section, although likely of most interest to geographers, is also perplexing from the perspective of modern cartographic methods. The maps look similar to what SYMAP output from the 1960s might have appeared had the laser printer been available at the time. None of these maps show the joint or overlapping distribution of word usages, nor is it easy for the reader to make appropriate inferences through visual comparison. Even those showing strata by demographic characteristics do so only by different shading of the dots representing the location of each respondent. Analyses of spatial clustering might have been useful, or isopleth maps showing the relative concentration of a particular usage by state. It might be, however, that the sampling methods employed in the implementation of DARE do not lend themselves to more sophisticated spatial representations of the patterns in the underlying data. Although one could perhaps use these data to map culture regions, the tools for such an inquiry are not readily at hand. It is difficult to determine how representative of their local communities the respondents were, given that many communities across the United States have a dominant culture within which are embedded immigrant neighborhoods and religious and social enclaves. It would certainly be interesting to create a GIS database for DARE, and experiment with contemporary methods for spatial representation. Even more interesting would be a replication of DARE in the 2010s, both to bring the story closer to the present and to compare changes in common usage of the American English language over the past fifty years.
Is there a place for DARE in a professional geographer's personal library? Generally I think not, unless one possesses both an especially sturdy bookshelf and a supplementary book fund. Whereas the five dictionary volumes list for $130 each, this volume is a comparative bargain at a mere $90 for a hardcover book of more than 1,000 pages. Personally, this is the one volume that I would wish to have, as it has something for everyone who might peruse it. Linguistic geographers and those interested in regional culture, however, will find that DARE Volume VI only scratches the surface, whetting the appetite perhaps, but leaving one longing for the full meal. On the other hand, a complete set of the DARE is something no academic or research library should be without.