Romancing the word: The unfinished adventure of a dictionary maker’s life
This feature on Cassidy was written in fall of 1999 by Michael Penn for On Wisconsin, the university alumni magazine.
Frederic Cassidy has relationships with words.
 Cassidy Related Web site: Dictionary of American Regional English Anyone interested in contributing to DARE should contact David Simon at (608) 265-9836. Contributions can be made out to DARE/UW Foundation and mailed to DARE, 6131 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706. |
You and I may think we do, as readers and as writers, but not like Cassidy. Ours are tawdry liaisons, use-’em-and-lose-’em affairs that have us gallivanting with another word before the memory of the last has faded. We are word gigolos, compared to Cassidy, who is the king of lexical romance.
Observe Cassidy’s method: recently, he has been reading Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, a book thick with Civil War-era Appalachian dialect – and thus dotted with words, to borrow his phrase, he “hasn’t met yet.” As he reads, he is distracted by the contours of those unfamiliar words, and he often finds himself plunging into one of his dictionaries to trace their etymologies. He ponders. He lingers. He stays for dinner, gets to know the family.
Cassidy reads dictionaries – actually reads them, as opposed to flitting through them in a purpose-driven manner. And whereas the rest of us may have one dictionary stuffed away on a remote shelf, he possesses several dozen, a selection that barely meets his need to explore the nuance of language. Paging through books such as Anglo-Saxon Poetry and Trinidad Yoruba, he rummages through flea markets of words, collecting them as most people do souvenirs. To him, they whisper secrets about exotic cultures and remote places.
“I’m a person who is especially gone on dictionaries, so I’m not typical,” Cassidy admits. He speaks methodically, like a man trying to choose the perfect wine to go with dinner. He envies those who do it better – people, he says, “for whom the whole panoply of words is alive in front of them” – failing to acknowledge that it is a rare man who stocks words like panoply in the pantry.
That pantry is full of extraordinary words, and among them are truly intriguing ones that rarely cross into Cassidy’s everyday vocabulary. These are words like paddybass and chizzywink and ground itch — words that for their peculiarity are pearls in the American fabric. Although they may not sound like products of American English, they’re American at their very heart, part of the organic vocabulary that most of us learn before we ever learn how to speak “properly.” To understand how Americans speak – how they really speak, as opposed to the artificially stuffy conversation we practice at cocktail parties – you need to listen to these words.
Cassidy has spent much of his life doing just that, chasing down the rare bits of Americana that hide in backwaters and bayous. He and a small band of fellow logophiles on UW–Madison’s campus are in the middle of an effort to publish the Dictionary of American Regional English, the most ambitious catalogue of the country’s vernacular ever attempted. Some forty thousand nuggets of regional dialect, gathered from all fifty states, have been printed in the dictionary’s first three volumes, which contain entries from A through O. When finished, the dictionary will include five volumes and an addendum, a work so mind-bogglingly huge that it has taken Cassidy and his team nearly four decades to get as far as they have.
It is Cassidy’s life work, and one that he may not live to see finished.
Not that Cassidy, who will turn ninety-two in October, and who is still at his desk five days a week, is giving up just yet.
“Have you ever been working on something that you really want to finish?” he says. “I really want to finish this! Perhaps I will see it through. But I’m not immortal.”
Cassidy may be mortal, but there is little evidence of it. There are concessions to age: his hearing is failing him, and he abandons Wisconsin for warmer climates during winter. But he is still every bit the bright, imaginative, witty English professor who joined UW–Madison’s faculty in 1939. When I arrived to interview him in his office in Helen C. White Hall – a small nook lined from tile to rafters with yellowing volumes and pictures of famous dictionary makers — I found him redecorating, hardly looking like a man with plans to go anywhere soon.
Though the day-to-day operations of DARE are handled by associate editor Joan Houston Hall and a capable staff of twelve editors and production assistants, Cassidy remains DARE’s bedrock. “Fred,” Hall says, “is an institution.” The pages of DARE reflect his passion and his unfailing standards, and he still reads every word that is printed.
Over the years, the identity of Cassidy and the identity of DARE have become somewhat intertwined. DARE has a cult following of writers and language lovers who cherish it not only for its scholarly value, but for its sheer originality. And the same could be said of Cassidy. As DARE’s chief editor, his relentless efforts to uncover the roots of folk society have rendered him a cultural icon. William Safire, whose column “On Language” appears in papers nationwide, once called him “America’s folk laureate.”
But Cassidy never set out to become an American icon. To begin with, he didn’t even start out American.
Born in Jamaica to a Canadian father and a Jamaican mother, Cassidy grew up “multilingual,” he says. He spoke standard British English with his parents, but delighted in the creole that flowed between the native islanders who worked around the house. Dictionaries were fixtures in his childhood, and the family Webster’s even served as his highchair at the dinner table. “The words came up into me by osmosis,” he says. When he wasn’t planted to a dictionary, he was browsing one, placing wagers with his father over the meanings of words.
Cassidy and his family moved to Akron, Ohio, at age eleven, where his gumbo of linguistic influences added Midwestern peers, a Scottish schoolteacher, and, down the line, a Parisian woman who would become his wife. Each new experience and exotic twang fed a growing fascination with the soft edges of language – where cultures collide and hatch new ways of talking.
“People who study the language and the way it develops are always discovering interesting things,” he says. “Say a word didn’t exist before 1950. Then how did you say that feeling? Did that feeling exist in someone’s mind? Did it not exist at all? Did it have to be invented?” As a professor, he returned to Jamaica to research and write a dictionary of the island’s folk language. It was a small-scale taste of what was to come.
At the time, no one had ever attempted a linguistic effort the scale of an American folk dictionary. The American Dialect Society, a group of academics and language buffs, had formed in 1889 largely for the purposes of publishing such a text, but by the 1960s still hadn’t been able to get the project off the ground. Cassidy, who at UW–Madison was teaching Old English and Anglo-Saxon languages, was intrigued. In 1963, he wrote a journal article that laid out just how someone might tackle the enormous task of collecting and transcribing the nation’s folk speech. Within months, the American Dialect Society took Cassidy up on his plan and made him chief editor.
“We must expect,” Cassidy wrote in 1963, “that collecting, to be adequate, must continue for at least five years, and editing, though it may begin before the collecting is completed, will take another three or four years.” Thirty-seven years into his eight year project, Cassidy chuckles at the estimation. “I was young and optimistic then.”
Lexicography is a slow business. Sir James Murray worked for thirty-seven years editing the Oxford English Dictionary before his death in 1915, and it took another thirteen years to finish its fifteen volumes. Editors of a German dictionary (among them the Brothers Grimm) spent 122 years toiling away on their project, earning the all-time record for lethargy among dictionaries and considerably stretching the definition of “publication.” And it should be noted that the American Dialect Society had taken seventy years just to decide on DARE’s editor.
You can understand the need for precaution; dictionaries aren’t the place for sloppiness. They are definitive works, reflecting the ground rules for acceptable communication. You can’t so much as play a game of Scrabble without their adjudicating power.
But in DARE’s case, a couple of other factors made Cassidy’s initial projection too hopeful. Most important was that no one had accurately surmised the vastness of turf to be covered. Folk dictionaries had been done in smaller communities, even in Britain, but never in a place so large and diverse as the United States.
Between 1965 and 1970, Cassidy dispatched eighty field workers, most of them graduate students, across the country to gather the linguistic gems of the land. Traveling in “word wagons” (Dodge campers) and carrying boxes of audio tapes, they visited 1,002 communities, from rural outposts to inner-city neighborhoods, looking for life-long residents willing to complete the 1,847-question survey DARE had designed to elicit localese. They asked everything from what you call someone who’s always in someone else’s business to what you say when someone sneezes. At the same time, volunteers perused a library of novels, plays, diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings.
When the collecting was done, editors had more than two million responses and nine hundred hours of audio tape to sift through. Not all of the responses end up in DARE; Cassidy and his staff first look for the words that demonstrate a regional pattern of use. But when it is complete, DARE will contain the definitions, origins, and uses for more than sixty thousand words. By comparison, most experts say that there are about two hundred thousand standard English words used commonly, and only about one hundred thousand in languages such as French.
For each word – including thousands that don’t make it to print – the staff undertakes a painstakingly exhaustive investigation. They consult dictionaries, historical documents, and collections of folklore to seek out roots. They look for printed examples that confirm what the interviews have told them and analyze other quotations for differences in spelling or meaning. It’s meticulous work that can sometimes stretch for weeks for a single word. And it’s a process that really can’t be hastened. Like a crossword puzzle, the answers sometimes come only after long and fruitless stretches of head-scratching. While DARE’s publication process has benefited some from the rapid technologies of the information age, the grunt work is thought work. And, Hall notes, “we can’t think any faster.”
An example stems from one of Hall’s favorite entries: bobbasheely, a versatile word used in the Gulf States to signify both a very close friend and the action of moving or associating in a friendly manner. DARE was stumped by the word, which an interviewer thought might be Irish. Later, an editor discovered bobbasheely in a Faulkner novel, which pointed them toward Southern roots. Exploring the cultures of the area led them to a Choctaw dictionary, where they found an entry for itibapishili, signifying a brother or twin — bobbasheely’s certain ancestor. Not all words lead editors weaving through such rich history, but a few, says Hall, turn out to be downright thrilling.
In 1985, fifteen years after the word wagons came home, DARE was ready to share the excitement, or at least three letters’ worth. Volume I, containing bobbasheely and some ten thousand similar delights, was a minor sensation among both scholars and lay readers, who bought more than sixteen thousand copies, running through five printings of the 903-page tome. A New York Times critic labeled the project “one of the glories of American scholarship,” and DARE’s notations began to pop up regularly in newspaper columns devoted to language. Volumes II and III followed to similar praise in 1991 and 1996.
Many readers love the books for their wonderful oddity. A romp through DARE’s pages is like a trip to a linguistic Disneyland, full of strange and exotic sounds and shrewd down-home wit. It is as if Garrison Keillor invented his own language, where good hunting dogs are cold-noses and the local bore is a cold potato.
DARE contains not only definitions, but citations, histories, and even maps that trace where regional words are used. The result is a book that is part dictionary, part social history – a sort of American travelogue, as told by the tongues of its inhabitants.
Consider the existence in the Minnesotan vocabulary (if not in actuality) of the wily agropelter, a ferocious beast that lives in hollow trees and kills wandering lumberjacks with tree limbs. Or the need of long-time residents of Maine to have a word – rusticator – that signifies a boarder on summer vacation. Those words tell us something about what life may be like in Minnesota or Maine. And they also disprove, at least partially, the notion that we live in a mass culture devoid of variety. The pervasiveness of McDonald’s and Gap stores aside, DARE’s pages bear out a nation that still harbors many views of reality, one that even today is channeled by gulfs of experience and culture. And as any rusticator will tell you, the common bond of English often isn’t enough to bridge the gap.
DARE steps in as a cultural Sacagawea, leading the way through the thicket of strange dialect and custom. Physicians, for example, are trained in medical school to treat skin rashes, but may well be stumped by a case of dew poison or ground itch, words commonly used in some parts of the country. Because DARE knows the lingo, it has become a standard desk reference for doctors and lawyers who work in unfamiliar surroundings.
One of DARE’s recent queries, for example, demonstrates that dialect is about more than a colorful accent. A few years ago, a psychiatrist asked DARE’s editors if there were any regional synonyms for stilts. He was confused because some of his patients kept identifying pictures of stilts as either tommywalkers or johnnywalkers . DARE’s editors were able to confirm that those words are perfectly normal synonyms for stilts in the South, but that’s not where the story ends.
The doctor worked with patients suffering from aphasia, and as part of their therapy he administered a national standardized test that asked patients to identify pictures of common objects such as stilts. Since tommywalkers and johnnywalkers weren’t in the answer key, he had to mark them as wrong, categorizing them as lacking appropriate vocabulary. If he administered the test again, after a period of therapy, with the same results, the patients could be labeled as showing no progress, a diagnosis that might cost them their Medicare coverage.
But DARE’s most surprising use is in tracking down criminals. The book’s editors aren’t exactly cut from the mold of Sam Spade, but they did play a small role in helping the FBI identify the Unabomber. After the Unabomber published his lengthy manifesto, the FBI brought in Roger Shuy, a Montana-based linguist, to analyze the text. Using DARE and other dictionaries to track regional influences of the bomber’s language, Shuy built a profile of the bomber’s background and experiences that proved startlingly accurate. “I keep my three volumes of DARE very handy to my desk,” Shuy wrote in a letter to Cassidy. “I find it invaluable, Needless to say, it would be even more valuable if it went beyond the letter O.”
That DARE is a masterpiece unfinished is a common complaint. The volumes are used widely by novelists, playwrights, and actors trying to master the speech mannerisms of a particular area of the country, and many grumble that DARE presently captures only half the landscape. Reference librarians keep checking to make sure they haven’t received an incomplete set. In fact, whenever Hall encounters a DARE fan, “When is the next volume going to be out?” is usually the first thing she hears.
Second is, “How is Fred doing?”
These days, Cassidy is careful to look both ways when crossing the street. He watches his step on Madison’s often-icy sidewalks. He takes his time, because he wants to stick around.
A few years ago, when Cassidy was in his youthful eighties, he was hit by a car while walking home from the grocery store. The accident, which broke several bones in his leg, left Cassidy unable to work and none too pleased. “I was using the crosswalk!” he still testily asserts. But the accident also amplified a rumble of concern that has surrounded DARE for years: Will Cassidy make it to see the end?
“He used to be optimistic about it,” Hall says. “But now I think he’s realistic.”
Volume IV is scheduled to be published in 2002, bringing DARE’s march through the alphabet halfway through S. If everything stays on course, Volume V will arrive just in time for Cassidy’s 100th birthday, in 2007. That’s merely a projection, though, a best-case scenario for a project that hasn’t always enjoyed the privilege of best cases. Although Cassidy is healthy today, the longer DARE drags on, the more he pushes the odds of longevity.
To his credit, Cassidy approaches the subject of his own mortality with characteristic wit and resigned patience. “There’s nothing I can do,” Cassidy says, “but work as long as I can.”
But there is also the complicating factor of DARE’s financial health, which for much of the last decade has wavered near flatlining.
DARE is a project of such daring that it almost certainly never will be attempted again. It is no cheap venture, costing about $600,000 a year to fund research and editorial tasks. That money has traditionally come from large grants: the initial gathering stage was funded by the U.S. Office of Education, and several sources, notably the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, have underwritten the long sifting and editing process. Those benefactors have been models of patience – in some cases ignoring their own guidelines to continue funding DARE. But editors knew that the money stream wasn’t endless.
In December 1995, the final Mellon grant expired, leaving precious little fuel in DARE’s engine. There wasn’t money to fill two open editor positions, and by 1997 the picture was so grim that Cassidy could not assure his staff that they would be employed by the year’s end. Hall recalls sending out staff memos with a rolling D-Day – we only have enough money to pay you through October 27 …
Hall spent weeks writing grant proposals and seeking out individual benefactors. Every day was like treading water, surviving on $20 and $50 checks from fans. Last year, DARE’s landlord – the university’s College of Letters and Science – tossed a life raft, agreeing to fund a development specialist as part of a three-year push to bolster DARE’s coffers. David Simon, who had successfully raised funds in previous campaigns for the UW Foundation, was hired, and his efforts have already enlivened hopes around Helen C. White. Not only have contributions from private individuals begun to arrive, but the big fish are nibbling again. In March, DARE won a new $350,000 matching grant from the NEH, and the Mellon foundation has come through with some additional money this year.
The money – plus the fact that they’re now working on the downslope of the alphabet – has brightened the mood around DARE’s offices. There is a sense that, for the first time, the dictionary has the momentum of inevitability. “The feeling is that we’ve come this far, we can’t possibly let it stop now,” says Hall. “We’re like the little engine that could.”
But Cassidy has been burned by predicting the future before. He’s not about to try it again. What matters more is that when – or even if – DARE is done, it will be done right. “If we had all the monetary support we need, we could add a couple more editors and cut off a couple of years,” he says. “But until we have adequate support – until we’re not limping along – we simply can’t speed it up.”
“If we had to speed it up seriously, we’d make mistakes,” he adds. “And that’s one thing we’re passionately serious about.” So Cassidy is content to tuck his reading glasses under his tuft of chalk-white hair, open one of the thick manila files on his desk, and introduce himself to a word he hasn’t met. He may be in the race of his life, but it is a race he’d rather lose than hurry.