Reckon

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Terry and I’m calling from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hello, Terry. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Terry.

Hi. Thank you, guys.

What’s up?

Thank you for keeping me company and a long move from North Carolina to Wisconsin.

Oh, that was a long drive.

Glad to help.

Did you listen to podcasts back-to-back?

Pretty much.

Oh, bless your heart.

Well, how can we continue to help you?

Well, I’m inquiring about the word reckon.

I’m originally from Buffalo, so we didn’t use it up there very much.

And then I moved to Japan and I had a British roommate.

And the first time I heard the word used normally was from her.

And I thought, oh, that’s funny.

That sounds like a southern thing.

And then I came across something that said the southern dialect is closer to old British English than any other dialect we use.

And so then I moved to North Carolina and I heard the word reckon again.

And I used it and somebody said, are you trying to sound Southern already?

I said, no, it’s not the Southern reckon, it’s the British reckon.

So I was wondering if the way the Southerners use it is like an old vestige of the Queen’s English that stayed behind here in the States.

Or if they just appeared separately naturally.

There is a myth that is very romantic that there are pockets of the South that preserve the Queen’s English.

But, of course, if that were the case, then we would have a reality show there,

And they would probably put a theme park there, you know, with little signs that say,

Thou must be this tall to ride the rides.

So it’s just a vestige in the way that other words are a vestige of the English that was spoken in England.

And reckon is pretty well distributed across the South, even into Texas.

Yeah, it’s marked in American English as being rural or southern,

Which is why when Americans hear people from the UK or Australia use reckon,

They’re a little confused because in our minds it goes to a certain type of person,

Whereas there it’s generally widespread and the kind of thing you might hear somebody talking about,

I reckon the fourth quarter of British Telecom is to pass the earnings of last quarter, you know.

They’ll just use reckon in a normal way without it being any kind of register of a particular region or a particular class of person.

Yeah, I think of reckon here as being more colloquial and rural, as you said.

And it’s a stock part of the southern dialect when it’s taught in speech classes for actors.

Right, or on the Beverly Hillbillies or something.

So now you said you were from Buffalo originally.

I bet there’s not a lot of reckoning happening up there, at least not using that word.

I had never heard it used up there.

Another interesting thing is when my British friends would mimic an American accent,

It was always Southern. It always came out Southern.

That’s interesting.

Maybe it’s in their collective conscious.

Part of the reason that on the surface Southern American English sounds like British English

Is there’s often a lack of roticity.

That is that the R’s tend to disappear more often in Southern American English than they do in other dialects of American English.

But there’s no evidence to support that Southern English is closer to British English than any other dialect of American English.

The truth is they were all forked, they were all sundered at about the same time from each other,

And they’ve all begun to change in different ways.

There are dialects in Maine that preserve some language features of dialects in the UK that don’t exist anywhere else in the country.

So it just depends where you are and what you’re measuring by how you might say that they’re similar.

Yeah, if you’re talking about North Carolina, the hills in North Carolina weren’t settled until 1790 or so,

And that’s quite a bit after the Queen’s English.

Yeah, and in truth, when we’re talking about British, we need to get a little more specific.

Much of the South shows the influence of Scots and Irish English and not the mainstream or prestige dialects of English,

Even of the 1700s or 1800s.

Well, that is nice to finally put that rumor to rest.

But it doesn’t mean that we can’t have delight in the varieties that are presented to us.

You sound like quite a traveler, and I bet you hear a lot of cool things in the speech of other people.

I do. It’s been interesting.

Well, cool. Thanks for calling, Terry. Really glad to help you out.

Thank you. Take care.

All right. Bye-bye.

Take care. Bye-bye.

You know, it’s interesting, Grant, that you think of I reckon as sort of rural or southern,

But you think of terms like reckoning, and it’s a higher register.

Reckoning or to be reckoned with.

Those are more formal, aren’t they?

I love that.

That’s a great example of the way that different parts of speech for related words can fall into different categories of language.

Well, if you’re like Terry and you travel from place to place and you accumulate language novelties,

Share them with us and the rest of our listeners, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.