Vocal Fry

I'm a sucker for stuff like this.  

Vocal fry -- sometimes called verbal fry -- is a term I heard on the radio a few days ago. It refers to 'a guttural fluttering of the vocal cords' and is increasingly used by young women - as in 'Motherrr' or 'Whateverrrr.'

I've been aware of this speech pattern for some time --  I love different dialects and this seems to be a distillation of Valley Girl speak. It's everywhere -- spreading into the general population. 

For other word nerds out there, there's a good article in the NY Times about vocal fry. The article also deals with up talk which is the quirk of ending every sentence with a rising inflection.  (She had this amazing outfit?  And she used to date Justin Bieber?)   Many Southern women have been doing this for years but now it's become a standard part of teenage-girl-speak. 

And the article touches on the use of like for emphasis -- It's like, amazing! -- and goes on to draw some interesting (to me, at least) conclusions about why girls and young women adapt these speech patterns.


Me, I'm still stuck in the speech patterns of my youth. I think all this stuff is neat. Or cool. But not groovy. I never got comfortable with groovy.

 

Ball Hooting in a Gaum

 This unseasonably warm and rainy weather that has flowers blooming too early has also made the ground muddy. John came in from getting fire wood and told me that the way into the pasture was a big gaum and he was afraid the Kubota ATV would go to ball hooting if he wasn't careful.

Before we moved here, I would have thought maybe he was speaking in tongues.  But I've learned the language.

A gaum (or gom) is a big mess -- in this case, a patch of mud, though it could apply to a teenager's room. And ball hooting means sliding around.  The term come from days of logging with horses -- pulling a big log down hill was dangerous for man and beast and you definitely didn't want that log to go to ball hooting.

  

A Living Language

"The living language is like a cow-path: it is the creation of the cows themselves who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay."

E.B White

I love White's image. As a writer, I find that I need to travel many paths in order to tell the story as it should be told. The main path -- that well-traveled one labeled Correct English Usage -- is the one I try to stick to for the narrative portions of my writing.

I may unintentionally stray now and then, as I slip into the comfortable Southern idiom of my upbringing, but generally I aim for the English teacher's ideal -- grammatical, with word usage and punctuation as close to standard as I can make them.

Occasionally I rebel. For example, my spell-checker, my dictionary, and my copy-editor all tell me that Realtor must always be capitalized. I disagree, feeling that it gives the word too much importance in a sentence (sorry, Sallie Kate) and continue to make it lower-case.

When I'm writing dialogue, those alternative paths of slang and dialect are crucial to making characters, with all their differences of age, education, and upbringing, come alive. I dearly enjoy exploring those side paths of language. Here again, I test my copy-editor's patience with my use of the North Carolina mountain talk as I've heard it.

The dialect is not one-size-fits-all -- some older characters may use atter and hit, their children will say after and it, and both generations will say you uns. Or perhaps y'uns -- it seems to differ from family to family. Elizabeth, from the South, though not the mountains, says you all (which my poor long-suffering copy editor wants to hyphenate or change to y'all.

I just change it back, being, as White says, under no obligation to stay.

This is a repost from 1/08.

The Yarkin Pearl

The folks at The Orchard told me to pick out a bag of apples to take with me and after browsing through the various varieties -- Jonathan, Stayman, Delicious -- I chose York.

It's a tasty, crisp eating apple and tart enough to be good for cooking too.  But, to tell the truth, I chose it for reasons of nostalgia.

Our first fall in the mountains, Clifford, our neighbor down the hill, gave me an apple to try, saying that it was an old time variety and a good keeping apple.  

I tasted it and was impressed. We were planning to plant apple trees come spring and I already had a tentative list of varieties.

"What's the name of this apple?" I asked, and was told that it was a Yarkin Pearl. 

Interesting, I thought, Yarkin could be the name of the discoverer or breeder of the apple and Pearl could be because it was so good -- or maybe the name of his daughter. Nice.

This was 1975 - pre-Internet -- and I began to hunt through my nursery catalogues and Rodale gardening books for more information on this pearl of a fruit -- but alas! I could find no Yarkin Pearls.

I intensified my search, checking various orchard-related books out of the library and leafing  through back issues of Mother Earth News and Organic Gardening.

1975 was also before I learned the language of my adopted home.

Finally I came across the name York Imperial.

York Imperial . . . Yarkin Pearl.

Yep.

Wild Day Lilies and Tame High Geraniums

Orange day lilies grow wild along the branches in our part of Carolina -- their massed presence makes up for what they lack in subtlety. I have day lilies in an array of colors and forms that I find much prettier, but these wildings are just so obliging. You can't kill em with a stick and they multiply freely. Plus, what a nice complement to Maggie's red-orange fur.

This beauty is a tame hydrangea (there are wild white ones too.) The local name for these flowering shrubs is 'high geranium,' which has a certain charm to it, don't you think?

(Over at Radine Trees Nehring's blog, there's a post about using dialect in writing -- is this a big no-no . . . or not? You probably know which side I come down on.)

This old building above, once a barn and now a garage/toolshed down at our lower place, was briefly used as a school when the nearby schoolhouse burned -- way back in the early years of the last century. There's no sign left of the scholars -- except for this disused door. But I like to think that on recess, they waded in the branch where the daylilies still grow.