Lexicographer, 88, imagines getting to ‘Z’

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PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
FRIDAY    November 2, 1990

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By Andrew Cassel, Inquirer Staff Writer

MADISON, Wis. – Think of it this way: If Frederic Cassidy were an astronaut, rather than a lexicographer, and if he’d blasted off in 1962 instead of agreeing to edit the Dictionary of American Regional English, by now he’d be more than halfway to Pluto.

Instead, Cassidy is less than halfway to Z. And at age 83, he’s half-willing to admit that the now 25-year-old scholarly project might outlast its director.

“I’m not sure I’m going to survive this effort,” he said, smiling behind a cluttered desk above the University of Wisconsin campus here. “It’s a race between the dictionary and me.”

Oddsmakers would have a tough call. It was 20 years from the time Cassidy’s field workers began looking under America’s furniture for the linguistic equivalent of dustballs (also called “woolies,” “collywobbles,” and “difflewuzz,” depending on the region) until the publication of Volume 1, A through C, in 1985.

“‘B’ turned out to be twice as large as we thought … We might need a separate volume for S by itself.”

Frederic Cassidy

Volume 2, D through H, was completed this year, but is still being proofread by his small battalion of scholars; publication is scheduled for fall 1991.

On the other hand, Cassidy himself appears remarkably hale and clear-eyed, demolishing a corned-beef sandwich while reflecting on the snail-like progress of his life’s work.

“The letter B turned out to be twice as large as we thought it was going to be,” he said. “I, J and K won’t be so bad – Volume 3 will probably go all the way to P, but S is the killer. We might need a separate volume for S by itself.”

Not that any serious lexicographer can expect results overnight. The landmark Oxford English Dictionary took 49 years to complete, and Cassidy’s own earlier project, which catalogued the Creole English of his native Jamaica, took him from 1951 to 1967.

Still, Cassidy thought when he accepted the American Dialect Society’s offer to edit its regional dictionary in 1962 that it would take five years to collect and five more to write. He wasn’t even close.

Fanning out to 1,002 communities from Brooklyn to Alaska, field workers armed with Cassidy’s massive 1,847-item questionnaire quizzed people on their words for everything from drinking to dragonflies, and returned with more than two million separate responses. Editors also combed about 7,000 written works including personal diaries, Yellow Pages, and writers such as William Faulkner, for distinctive regionalisms.

Everything was logged, cross-referenced and computerized – and re- computerized as technology leaped ahead of the dictionary’s editors. It took five years just to devise a system for ordering all the material, and another five to get it all stored, according to associate editor Joan Hall.

DARE explains why children from around New York as late as the 1950s played on a “sliding pond” – deriving from the Dutch word for track.

Hall believes that the rest of the dictionary – either three or four volumes, nobody is quite sure – will be produced in five-year intervals. “In terms of actually writing the entries for a particular volume, I don’t think there’s any way to streamline the process that we haven’t already done.”

And the results are indisputably impressive. Readers of Volume 1, which contained about 14,000 entries, could discover that in parts of North Carolina, firecrackers are “baby-wakers,” or that “Connecticut River pork” was once a New England term for shad.

The dictionary, known as DARE in linguistic circles, takes elaborate pains to uncover the derivations for obscure terms such as “astorperious,” meaning as haughty as the Astor family; and explains why children from around New York as late as the 1950s played on a “sliding pond” – retaining a 17^th-century contraction of the Dutch word paan, meaning track.

Volume 2 adds more than 16,000 new examples, including gum-band, the Pittsburgh word for an elastic band; and dressing, which refers to gravy in Pennsylvania, pancake syrup around the Great Lakes and manure in New England.

Readers can learn how “falling downstairs” came to mean getting a haircut in Wisconsin, and that if you do it the hard way in South Carolina you can “go all around your elbow to get to your thumb.”

“It’s a magnificent project,” said  University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov, adding that Cassidy’s staff of 20 has in fact not gone all around its collective elbow at all. “Works of scholarship of this kind cannot be turned out overnight,” Labov said. “Actually it has been accomplished very efficiently.”

Cassidy himself is not about to sacrifice thoroughness for speed, not on a project that was envisioned by the founders of the American Dialect Society 73 years before Cassidy finally got it started. “This is the only time that it’s going to be done,” he said. “It’d be a shame not to put it all in.”

Nor does the fact that it is likely to take perhaps three times as long to complete as the Apollo moon project faze him at all. “But look how many millions they put into that,” he retorts.

DARE itself has cost “a million or so” already, and continues only by virtue of Cassidy’s constant prodding for grant money from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation and others. Though the first volume was a minor coffee-table hit in 1985, no profits have come back to support the editors in their crowded 10-room suite above the university’s library here.

“When people hear of billions and billions spent for weapons, they don’t blink,” Cassidy says. “But somehow if you talk of a million for scholarship, they get very critical. . . . If it’s worth doing at all, you’ve got to spend the money.”

At the same time, a trace of concern creeps into his conversation as Cassidy contemplates the task ahead. “The others will come faster,” he says at first. “I don’t think we can spend five years getting out the third volume.”

He reluctantly defers, however, when presented with Joan Hall’s estimate. “Joan is a realist about this,” he sighs. “I’m foolishly optimistic. But if I could last to 2007 – my 100^th year – surely it would be done by then.”

His voice puts a question mark on the sentence. Then he adds: “Needless to say, I’m going to stick around as long as I can.”