Whistle Pig Critter

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is John Zirania, and I’m calling from central Tennessee, your big Southport National Rec area.

Oh, yeah, I’ve been there. I love that place. Beautiful.

What’s up?

Well, I had a question about language, and this time it’s about an unofficial map of how we call animals different things in the United States.

Specifically, I grew up in Wisconsin. I went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

And up there, we call woodchucks woodchucks. They’re marmots. Marmots are woodchucks.

And I discovered when I moved to the south, somewhere around Tennessee, and it’s not in Kentucky, but somewhere in Tennessee when you go south, people start calling woodchucks whistlepigs.

And I’d never heard of a whistlepig.

So how did that happen?

And is there an unofficial map?

Is there a whistlepig line, just like there’s a Mason-Dixon line?

You know what, John?

There is.

There is a map.

Across the whistlepig line, mister.

There is a map in the Dictionary of American Regional English, which has a whole long entry for whistle pig, meaning that kind of animal, a groundhog.

A marmot.

Marmot, woodchuck.

Doesn’t marmot sound like a meetup word, though?

Marmot?

Yeah, marmot, rather than the official name of an animal.

Marmot.

You know, it goes back to Latin, I think, all the way back to Latin for mountain mouse.

So this map is…

Yeah, this map is astonishing.

So am I reading this correctly?

It looks like it’s all along the Appalachian Mountains.

Totally, totally.

Eastern Tennessee then, eastern Kentucky.

Yeah, it is in eastern Kentucky for sure.

And yeah, it just maps out perfectly on the Appalachians.

A little bit of Pennsylvania though.

Yep.

And what’s this Idaho thing, right?

In Idaho it looks like it’s a different animal, prairie dogs or ground squirrels.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

These animals go by lots of different names.

But I love the name Whistlepig.

Have you ever heard one of these, John?

I’ve seen them.

I’ve never heard them whistle.

Do they whistle?

I’m like a pig.

I don’t know what it comes from.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, they do whistle.

In fact, they sound like birds.

They actually sound like birds tweeting.

Yep.

I’m sure you can go on YouTube and listen to whistle pigs.

Yeah, yeah, and play it on your phone.

Go out into the woods.

There you go.

Play it on your phone and see what happens.

Yeah.

But whistle pig, which is such an odd name for it’s a tiny rodent, right?

Well, right.

Pig may be not always about the porker, right?

Right.

Well, yeah, it falls into that line of animals that are named for what they look like.

Like the word porpoise comes from Latin, porcus piscis, which means pig fish.

Pig fish.

You know, whistle pig.

Ground hog.

I mean, it’s not really a hog, right?

Yeah, so.

John, thank you so much for your call, sir.

Thank you very much for your time.

I appreciate answering my question.

Yeah, sure.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

We talk about it all the time on the show, but the D.A.R.E. Dictionary,

The Dictionary of American Regional English, has a bunch of maps like these.

It’s at daredictionary.com.

Your library may have it.

This is a great work of lexicography.

It is.

This is American history in language form.

It’s a nightstand reading for me, actually.

I love it.

Nerd!

Whistlepig!

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