Logan in Frankfort, Kentucky, says when he was growing up in the southeastern part of the state, he’d hear people using the word wasper for the insect most people call a wasp. This dialectal variant is common in Appalachia, along with wast and warsper. In that same area, people sometimes add that ending to words such as musician and billfold, saying musicianer or billfolder. This variant may reflect settlement patterns. In the UK, the word jasper is sometimes used for “wasp.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “A Wasper is a Flyer with a Stinger”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Logan. I’m calling from Frankfort, Kentucky.
So what’s on your mind, Logan?
So I grew up in Pulaski County here in Kentucky, and I was curious, now that I live in Frankfort and work with a lot of people who aren’t necessarily from, you know, so close to eastern Kentucky, a lot of times I say words like wasper that kind of catches them off guard.
So I got to thinking one day about that word wasper and was curious, I guess, why it regionally, I guess, got elongated with the instead of wasp like everybody wants to hear.
So you use wasper to refer to the insect with the stinger.
Yeah, yeah, that’s right.
Okay. And are you the only person you know that says that?
I know a number of other people. When I was growing up in Pulaski County, wasper was, I didn’t realize that, you know, until I learned about colloquialisms later in life that, you know, that everybody didn’t use the word wasper. That was total commonplace to me.
And so I’ve had people from, you know, around Pulaski and up through eastern Kentucky. And it’s a little spotty, it seems, you know, who uses the word wasper and who doesn’t.
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Eastern Kentucky is exactly where I would expect to find that.
The various linguistic atlases and field work on dialects and bits of research done and even just folklore collected and novels that have been written have found that wasper is far more common in eastern Kentucky, parts of Tennessee, and North Carolina. Kind of where those states meet. You could just draw a big circle, maybe 150-200 miles or so. There are some reports of other states, but that’s kind of the main place where people would say wasper. It’s recorded in print as far back as the 1940s, but I have no doubt that it’s much, much older than that.
It’s often the way with these things where they’re far older than when they first show up in print. Now, as to the why, well, with these dialect pronunciations, the why is not something that we can usually say. It just is the way people speak.
It may have something to do with the heritage of the people, where they come from. There’s a lot of settlement history there of people from a particular part of the UK. And I note that in the UK, jasper can mean wasp. But I don’t know that the jasper is earlier than the wasper in the U.S. They may be unrelated. It might be just a coincidence. So I’m not really sure.
But the gets added to some words in that area.
Yeah, billfolder instead of billfold. Do you know anybody that says that, Logan?
No, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody say billfolder. That would be a new one to me, I believe.
What about musicianer instead of musician?
No, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that either. Yeah, they’re both less common.
Let me ask you, have you ever heard anybody, instead of saying wasper, saying wast? It would look like W-A-S-T.
Well, I’ve not heard wast, but I’ll tell you what kind of deviates a little bit more that I’ve heard is warsper, with an extra R thrown in there, kind of like, you know, I hear a lot of old folks say warsh and things like warder. So I hear that extra R get added occasionally.
Yeah, that has been recorded as well. That wasp, as a matter of fact, is one that shows up in the dialect dictionaries for sure, that R insertion. And all of these things happen as a natural function of just the way the sounds appear in the mouth.
So when you have wasp, that S and P are hard to pronounce together. And one interesting thing is that wasper sometimes for some people is only in the plural and not the singular. That wasper would mean more than one wasp and not a single wasp.
Well, that’s funny because I’ve had a couple of people that I work with that aren’t from the area agree that in the plural, waspers instead of wasps, it just rolls off the tongue better and feels a little better to say.
Yeah, because WASPs, because the SPS is hard to say, but WASPers is easier to say.
Yeah, yeah.
All right. Well, Logan, thank you so much for the call. We really appreciate it. If anything else occurs to you from Pulaski County, we would love to take your call again.
All right. Well, thank you. I appreciate it.
All right. Be well. Good talking with you.
All right. Good talking with you all. Give us a call, 877-929-9673, and tell us about the language where you live.
