Readers Offer Advice, Adverbs, Aviation Argot
Today, some feedback on recent columns...
In a July offering on early American speech, I blithely wrote that colonial travelers reported a surprising uniformity in American language. Bob Chapman of Newington, Connecticut, wrote to challenge that generalization, citing persuasive evidence from a 1998 biography of lexicographer Noah Webster by Harlow Giles Unger.
According to Unger, when Webster visited an American army encampment at Newburgh, New York, in 1782, "he heard a dizzying cacophony of languages and accents -- Dutch, French, German, Swedish, Gaelic, and varieties of English that the Connecticut Calvinist from Yale had never heard before: the muddy drawls of the rural South and the clipped utterances of militiamen from the northern reaches of New Hampshire. He could not understand them, and the sporadic fights he saw told him that many of them could not understand one another, either."
It was this experience, Unger noted, that inspired Webster to compile a schoolchildren's reader that would help standardize American spelling and pronunciation.
Webster's observations clearly suggest much more diversity in 18th-century American speech than I reported. Given all these discordant dialects, it's a wonder we managed to win the Revolutionary War.
Virginian: "Y'all charge!"
Frenchman: "Oui!"
Virginian: "Yup, all of you."
In another July column, I asked readers whether they could think of any words ending in "-ly" that could be used as both adjectives and adverbs (other than "kindly," "only," "bodily," "gingerly," "daily," "hourly," "weekly," "monthly" and "yearly").
Eagle-eyed emailer Jim Schmerl spotted "lively" (lively dance; step lively); "lowly" (lowly circumstances; stoop lowly); and "westerly" and "easterly" (westerly winds; the ship sailed easterly). Thanks, Jim!
In response to my recent column about aviation slang, my friend and high school classmate Allan Schappert sent me some amusing and irreverent terms he encountered as a B-52 bomber pilot: "Popeye" (flying in weather with little or no forward visibility); "feet wet" (flying over water); "flight risk" (any senior officer at a set of flight controls); "momentarily disoriented" (completely lost); "bug smasher" (a single-engine light aircraft); "co-pilot landing" (hard touchdown); "suck on the hose" (go on oxygen); "bandit" (enemy aircraft); "tally ho" (I have visual contact); and "bombs away" of which, Allan writes, "self-explanatory, and, yes, we still say that."
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Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Connecticut, invites your language sightings. His book, "Mark My Words," is available for $9.99 on Amazon.com. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via email to WordGuy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.
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