It’s the holidays, and if you’re lucky, you may be spending extra time with family and relatives, perhaps in multiple generations. Some inter-generational differences can cause friction, while others are cause for fascination, or at least gentle amusement. The different words and phrases used by folks of different generations, or even different geographic areas, can be an example of the latter.
Recently, I’d been feeling “under the weather.” A coworker asked if I’d been “feeling peaky” then asked if I knew what that meant. I replied I did, and that it must be like the expression my 87-year-old father used, feeling “peaked,” pronounced PEAK-id. That saying reminded me of the expression my grandmother used for feeling poorly. She’d say, “I feel punk”, which as a kid in the 1980’s used to make me howl with laughter, envisioning my grandmother in the punk rocker style of the time.
This banter about old or regional expressions brought to mind a resource in our collection, a 1961 PhD dissertation from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge called, “A Word Atlas of North Louisiana” by Mary Lucille Pierce Folk. This study showed that for words or expressions of ‘feeling somewhat poorly,’ the most common word at that time in North Louisiana was not “peaky” or “punk”, but “puny!”
Image: Map 1302 from “A Word Atlas of North Louisiana,” Ph.D. dissertation of Mary Lucile Pierce Folk, Louisiana State University, 1961
Mrs. Folk used students from Louisiana Tech University to interview informants in every North Louisiana parish and then mapped the responses parish by parish. The students were also informants themselves, representing the “young” cohort. They also interviewed middle-aged and elderly people.
Food names are featured prominently in Mrs. Folk’s study. Many of these entries reminded me of the various food terms I had to learn when I moved here as a native New-Englander. For example, “English peas” was listed as the most common term for the tiny, round green vegetable sometimes known as “green peas,” or up North, generally just known as “peas”. Here, as Mrs. Folks’ study showed, peas have an entire vocabulary unto themselves. “Corn on the cob” was most commonly reported in the study as “roasting ears.” The term “syrup” is used for cane syrup (definitely not maple syrup), followed by the term “molasses.”
Peanuts were “peanuts,” at least to 58% of respondents, which still left 40% of respondents to call them “goobers.” Unlike most other words in the entire study, a rare one-hundred percent of respondents called a “fried cake with a hole in the center” a “doughnut.”
Some other interesting findings were: Seventy-seven percent of informants called a jail a “calaboose,” a word I’d never heard before. Another word, “courting” was favored over the word “dating,” chosen by 50% of respondents, versus 21%. That left another quarter of respondents with intriguing expressions, such as “wooing” or “sparking.” (Those terms sound much more exciting than my Yankee grandmother’s term, “get next to!”)
One of the most fascinating of the word maps for this time of year is the one for the greeting used on Christmas morning. For the vast majority of respondents (70%), the greeting was “Christmas gift!” as opposed to “Merry Christmas!” Unsure that I was actually reading correctly that “Christmas gift” was used as an exclamation, I did some online searching for the term. In fact, it was used as an exclamation, but it was more than just that. At least pre-1950, the saying was a way to claim the first gift of the day. By the time the custom trickled down over the years, there wasn’t necessarily a particular prize like getting the first gift, but there was still some glory to be had in being the first in the family to say it, according to a writer in “Garden & Gun” magazine. She remembered her South Carolina grandmother calling on the telephone at practically the crack of dawn on Christmas, even though they’d be seeing her later in the morning at a family Christmas brunch, just to be the first to say, “Christmas gift!”
It can be captivating to page through Mary Folks’ dissertation to see the words and phrases used commonly a mere 60 years ago that, in many cases, have now all but disappeared. The dissertation is available online at LSU’s Digital Commons website or you can visit the History Center to read a copy. Be forewarned that Mary Folk studied and mapped the vocabulary of white residents only, in 1961, and many of the terms used, especially for racial and ethnic groups, are today considered categorically offensive.
Image: Map 1307 from “A Word Atlas of North Louisiana,” Ph.D. dissertation of Mary Lucile Pierce Folk, Louisiana State University, 1961
Another fun linguistic resource, for which the Chief Editor of DARE served as an advisor, is the documentary film “American Tongues,” which is available to stream for free with your library card through Kanopy. The film’s summary quips: “Southerners talk too slowly. New Yorkers are rude. New Englanders don't say much at all. Anybody who lives in the U.S. knows the clichés about how people in the various parts of the country handle the English language. “American Tongues” is the first documentary to explore the impact of these linguistic attitudes in a fresh and exciting manner.”
If you need help accessing Kanopy, contact or visit us at the Bossier Parish Libraries History Center. You can also visit us to peruse our oral histories collection to hear or read local dialects. We are located at 2206 Beckett Street, Bossier City. We are open: M-Th 9-8, Fri 9-6, and Sat 9-5. For more information, and for other intriguing facts, photos, and videos of Bossier Parish history, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, @bplhistorycenter on TikTok
Article by: Pam Carlisle
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