Earlier this year, we wrote about the regional differences in how Americans refer to soft drinks. An exploration of the various geographical names for a carbonated beverage is all well and good, but it’s important to remember that America’s lexical variations are significantly more colorful than “soda,” (East and West coasts), “coke,” (South), and “pop” (Midwest and Northwest).
For those interested in experiencing the full range of verbal Americana, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) has finally become available online after 47 years of work. Unlike any other dictionary, DARE attempts to document the regional aspects of American English, and systematize the wide array of geographically unique terms and expressions. As John McWhorter notes in The New Republic, this labor of linguistic love contains some 60,000 entries from 1,002 communities, collected between 1965 and 1970. Of course, as McWhorter points out, some of the terms indexed in DARE are dated, having succumbed to mass-media’s democratizing effects on language over the course of DARE’s lengthy preparation. Still, with entries like “rich relatives” (dust bunnies) and “Canadian perjunkety” (pimples), the dictionary provides a fascinating glimpse of the verbal curios, both old and new, that have sprung up around the country.
Although DARE is a subscription-based service, its website provides visitors with a list of 100 free and browsable terms. We’ve included a selection below:
“To acknowledge the corn – to admit to being drunk; by extension, to admit to any mistake, fault, or impropriety (formerly widespread, now chiefly Midland).”
“Flea in one’s ear – A hint, warning, disquieting disclosure; a rebuke (chiefly Northeast)”
“Lucy Bowles – loose bowels, diarrhea (scattered, but esp. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, southeastern New York)”
“Slick and a promise – A hasty or superficial performance of a task (chiefly New Jersey)”
Additionally, a sample of audio recordings demonstrating the breadth of accents and vocabularies in various generations, cities, and classes during the ‘60s may be found on the University of Wisconsin-Madison DARE website.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
A few years ago, I stumbled upon a never-sent letter written to a friend when we were both in college. The contents weren’t heavy. Disorganization is the most likely explanation for why it never went in the mail. I cracked the envelope and had a look.
It was a time capsule, for sure, a cringe-inducing one. It wasn’t so much the life I was reporting on as how I framed it, self-aggrandizement straining to pass as nonchalance. Fortunately, an artist acquaintance happened to be running a project— send her your shreddable documents, and eventually, she’d send you a few sheets of handmade paper in which your mulched data mingled with that of others. Truly a beautiful way to dispose of the evidence.
But what happens when neither the writer, nor the intended recipient, is the finder of the lost letter? In February 2013, some mail posted by Lt. Joseph O. Matthews, a soldier stationed at a military training facility in Jacksonville, North Carolina, found its way to Abbi Jacobson, an actress (and coloring book author!) renting an apartment on MacDougal Street in New York City. Addressed to Matthew’s wife, the cancellation mark was dated December 2, 1944.
Jacobson opened the letter, the condition of the envelope having suggested that she would not be the first to breach its contents during the 69 years it had spent wandering in the wilderness. The words inside were romantic, a young officer informing the bride he’d left back home that he’d soon be shipping out to Okinawa. Eager to pull an Amélie by reuniting the letter with those to whom it would mean the most, Jacobson enlisted the help of her friend, documentary filmmaker Todd Bieber. Together they searched records at City Hall, looking for clues. When that approach proved fruitless, they created the Lost Letter Project, a web portal that invited the public to join in the search.
An avalanche of tweets, Facebook updates, and human interest pieces ensued. In no time at all, they had their man, or rather his descendants, Lt. Matthews having passed away in 1999, crushing Jacobson’s dreams of hand delivering the letter to “a little old man and a little old lady.” (I’m willing to bet Jacobson will one day wish there was a giant blender capable of turning digital statements like how cute would that be, my god, right? I love old people into handmade paper.)
Bieber’s video reveals what became of Lt. Matthews and his wife. Even more interesting is how the letter resonates with his grown children, particularly a certain theological reference at odds with the man they thought they knew.
Some of the prints, like the one below, certainly have a foreign quality to them. They feel far away in terms of time and place. But others (like the shot above) feel remarkably close, something we can all relate to today.
According to the PDR, the pictures came to reside in the Dutch National Archive as a result of the centuries-long commercial relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese. More vintage pix can be viewed here.
Nelson Mandela, who died on December 5, 2013, had spent more than a quarter of his life serving time in various jails. While behind bars for the 18-year period between 1962 and 1980, the anti-apartheid revolutionary educated both himself and others to prepare for the advent of multiracial equality in South Africa. During his confinement at the Robben Island prison, Mandela studied law by correspondence at the University of London, learned Afrikaans to foster a rapport with jailhouse wardens, and was instrumental in launching the “University of Robben Island”, where prisoners possessing expertise in particular fields presented lectures to their fellow inmates.
Mandela’s stay, however, was frequently marred by demeaning and deplorable treatment. Initially, black prisoners were humiliated by being given shorts, commonly worn by children, rather than full-length pants as uniforms. Mandela was also forbidden from wearing sunglasses when forced to labor at a limestone quarry, and the harsh reflections from the rocks damaged his vision. The quarry dust also damaged his tear ducts, which made it impossible for him to cry until receiving corrective surgery in 1994. Perhaps the most painful moments arrived in the late 1960s, when Mandela lost his mother and firstborn son, and was denied permission to attend their funerals.
“That poem was his favorite… When he lost courage, when he felt like just giving up — just lie down and not get up again — he would recite it. And it would give him what he needed to keep going.”
Freeman, who played Mandela in the 2009 film Invictus, also provides a solemn and dignified recitation of the poem beginning at 3:51. Although the poem is best known for providing succour to Mandela in times of despair, its words of courage have served as inspiration to countless others. Famous figures who have drawn hope from “Invictus” include the father of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi during his struggle for Burmese independence and tennis champion Andre Agassi. Rumor has it that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was also quite fond of it. We’ve included the full text for “Invictus” below:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
H/T to Bruno, one of our readers, for sending this video our way.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
While Terkel is famous for interviewing everyday people for his oral histories of the Depression, work, and World War II, and his radio show featured its fair share of students, domestic workers, and veterans, this particular archive is full of big names: Actress and comedian Lily Tomlin. Literary theorist Edward Said. Actor and activist Sidney Poitier.
Currently, there are about twenty audio files available, and the archive promises more to come, pending digitization and the clearing of rights. (Let’s hope they hurry up! Some of the placeholder entries for not-yet-available interviews—Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Arthur C. Clarke—are most tantalizing.)
The one downside to this archive is that you can’t download the interviews—a potential drawback for addicted podcast fans. However, if you have a smartphone and a good data connection, it’s simple enough to listen to the files straight from your phone’s Chrome browser.
Above you can listen to Terkel interview a young Bob Dylan in 1963. The remaining parts of the interview can be found here. Note: The Dylan interview isn’t actually in the Pop Up archive. But it is another one of Terkel’s legendary interviews. So we wanted to add it to the mix.
Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaonion.
Why? Because “Alexander kept pushing forward. He didn’t want to have to go home and be dominated by his mother.” The same impulse drove Tyson to box his way out of Brownsville, Brooklyn. That’s all covered in his autobiography.
At least since that 17th century architect of the scientific revolution, Sir Francis Bacon (who was mostly right), people have been making predictions about the technologies and social advancements of the future. And since Bacon, scientists and futuristic writers have been especially in demand during times of great change and uncertainty, such as at the turn of the last century. In 1900, civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. in Ladies’ Home Journal claimed to have surveyed “the most learned and conservative minds in America… the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning.”
Specifying advances likely to occur 100 years thence, “before the dawn of 2001,” Watkins culled 28 predictions about such things as travel and the transmission of information over great distances, biological and genetic mutations, and the domestic comforts of the average consumer. Several of the predictions are very Baconian indeed—as per the strange list at the end of Bacon’s science fiction fragment New Atlantis, a text obsessed with altering the appearance of the natural world for no particular reason other than that it could be done. Watkins’ list includes such predictions as “Peas as Large as Beets,” “Black, Blue, and Green Roses,” and “Strawberries as Large as Apples.” Some are Baconian in more sinister ways, and these are also a bit more accurate. Take the below, for example:
There will be No Wild Animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct. A few of high breed will be kept by the rich for racing, hunting and exercise. The automobile will have driven out the horse. Cattle and sheep will have no horns. They will be unable to run faster than the fattened hog of to-day. A century ago the wild hog could outrun a horse. Food animals will be bred to expend practically all of their life energy in producing meat, milk, wool and other by-products. Horns, bones, muscles and lungs will have been neglected.
I would defer to ecologists and meat industry watchdogs to confirm my intuitions, but it does seem that some of this, excepting the extermination of vermin and horns, has come to pass or is very likely in regard to several species. Another prediction, this one about our own species, is laughably optimistic:
Everybody will Walk Ten Miles. Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.
We’re much closer to the future of Pixar’s Wall‑E than anything resembling this scenario (unless you live in the world of Crossfit). Another prediction is both dead on and dead wrong at once. Claiming that there will be “from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in the Americas and its possessions by the lapse of another century” did in fact turn out to be almost uncannily accurate—current estimates are somewhere around 300,000,000. The “possessions” alluded to, however, display the attitude of blithe Monroe doctrine expansionism that held the nation in its sway at the turn of the century. The prediction goes on to say that most of the “South and Central American republics would be voted into the Union by their own people.” A few more of Watkins’ predictions, some prescient, some preposterous:
Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world.
Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles.
Hot and Cold Air from Spigots. Rising early to build the furnace fire will be a task of the olden times.
Ready-Cooked Meals will be Bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of to-day [see the above Wall‑E reference]
There will be No C, X, or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.
Aeriel War-Ships and Forts on Wheels. Giant guns will shoot twenty-five miles or more, and will hurl anywhere within such a radius shells exploding and destroying whole cities.
How Children will be Taught. A university education will be free to every man and woman.
Ah, if only that last one had come true! To read all of Watkins predictions in detail, click on the image above for a larger, readable, version of the full article.
The great British empiricist Francis Bacon once remarked that Johannes Gutenberg’sprinting press “changed the whole face and state of the world.” Although Gutenberg did not independently devise the press, he invented a mass-production process of moveable type and concocted an oil-based ink which, when combined with the wooden press, revolutionized the flow of information. Books could now be published in vast quantities, at only a fraction of the time required previously.
For his first seminal printing, Gutenberg picked the Bible — an obvious choice for a Christian, and in retrospect, perhaps the only book whose historical significance rivals that of Gutenberg’s invention. Produced in 1454 or 1455, the few surviving copies of Gutenberg’s Bible remain exemplars of the printer’s forethought and craftsmanship; the page dimensions, it is believed, were devised by Gutenberg to echo the golden ratio of Greek aesthetics. The first page appears above.
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