Medical Misery, Pone, and Rising

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good afternoon. This is Dr. Charles DeVant up in the mountains of North Carolina, a little town called Blowing Rock.

Well, hello, Dr. DeVant. It’s nice to talk to you. Welcome to the show.

Well, I just had a couple of questions, and one is that the mountains up here, we have Scotch-Irish families that go back to the 1600s or so, and they have some interesting medical terms, or terms for medical conditions anyway. That I thought I would pass on.

Two of them are easy to decipher, and the other one I really can’t. They tend to describe something as painful. They may say they have a misery, like I’ve got a misery in my jaw if it’s a tooth or a misery in my back if it is something back there.

Sometimes the miseries turn out to be risins, which I guess I would spell R-I-S-I-N-G, swelling up, you know, and that’s usually, a risin is usually an abscess. And so that I can decipher, but sometimes the abscess starts as a pone, P-O-N-E, or they’ll have a pone in their neck or a pone under their arm, you know, and that’s a lump or a cyst or something like that. But I have no idea how we get pone from cyst or lymph gland.

Oh, I’m so glad you asked about this because it’s really interesting. The word pone, in terms of a risin or a swelling, comes from a Native American language. It comes from a similar sounding word in Virginia Algonquian language, and the word translates to something like bread or baked. And so it’s like, you know, corn pone. It’s shaped sort of like a little loaf.

Okay, that makes sense. And I’m interested, too, that you brought up the expression risin. We once had a call from a doctor in Alabama who said that he had a patient who said, I got a risin in my leader. Did you ever have anybody say that?

Very similar, yeah. They’ll come in, and, you know, any place that you’ve got a cyst, be it on your back or your rear end or something, you know, it swells up, and they’ll describe it as a risin. And usually a risin will get drained.

Well, you must hear some wonderful language in that part of the country.

Oh, we have fun anyway, for sure. Up here in the mountains, we tend to append A, the letter A, particularly to verbs. You know, the song, She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain is frequently sung as she’ll be a-coming around the mountain. Or people will say, he must have been a-going 90 miles an hour when he hit the tree. Or the neighbors had a party the other night, and they were a-hooting and a-hollering until 3 o’clock in the morning.

What part of speech is that little A that gets tucked onto things?

Well, it used to be a preposition, like at, A-T, or on, O-N, but it resolved over the centuries into just A, and the American dialects that use it got it from much earlier British varieties of English. And so in the past, you might have said, I’m at going. And I know that sounds weird, but it means you are continuously going. It’s about the progressive form of the verb. This is something that is ongoing.

You can also use it to form what are called adverbial complements by affixing the a to an adjective. And it’s incredibly… It used to be more common, but it is really rapidly disappearing. And it was formerly used throughout Appalachia in the U.S. South by both whites and blacks, but it’s becoming something of a historical artifact at this point.

Yeah, up here occasionally people will still say there are a feared of something instead of afraid of something. We are in the Appalachian Mountains, so that makes good sense.

Doctor, we want to thank you so much for sharing these stories with us. We really appreciate it. And think of us next time you’re hiking in the mountains.

I will think of you every time. Take care.

All right. You be well now.

Well, unless you’ve got a rising in your leader, you can give us a call. Reach for that telephone, 877-929-9673. It’s toll-free in the mountains of North Carolina and all over Canada and the United States.