A physician in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, shares some of the vocabulary of his patients from Appalachia. There, a misery is anything painful, such as a misery in my jaw if they have a painful tooth or a misery in my back if they have lumbar pain...
How long do you have to remain in a place before you can truthfully say you lived there, as opposed to just visiting it? What’s the difference between to live somewhere and to stay somewhere? This philosophical question is complicated by the...
Judy in Fort Worth, Texas, is writing some historical fiction. What are some tips for representing the dialect and vernacular of a particular time and place with accuracy? One great resource is the Dictionary of American Regional English. Another...
Barbara in Norfolk, Virginia, wonders about the drawl of Southern American English. A great resource on how people perceive others’ dialects is the work of linguist Dennis Preston and his book Perceptual Dialectology. This is part of a...
In eastern Pennsylvania, the adjective strubbly describes hair that’s unkempt or messed up. It’s also spelled “strubley,” “stribley,” “stroobley,” “strubly,” “stribly,”...
A listener calling from the public library in Chowan County, North Carolina, says her father used the word kyarn to describe something unpleasant or repulsive, as in describing something that isn’t worth a kyarn or stinks like kyarn. Also...
