Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (review)

For Appalachians of a certain generation, the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English is not a reference work. It's memoir.

While I grew up watching Gilligan's Island and American Bandstand, I also heard, repeatedly, the story of how my father was made fun of when asked for his merchandise to be put in a "poke" at the army PX. And my grandparents and their friends were always using words and phrases that I thought peculiar, both in the sense of oddity and singularity. In my childhood, I thought only the folks around where I lived talked like that.

I didn't know that they were speaking a dialect of an entire region. And now, the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English has reminded me of that.

The tome weighs in at 710 pages and is absolutely scholarly in its approach. It is based on the work of linguist Joseph Sargent Hall, who began interviewing residents of the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee in the 1930s after the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park brought national attention to the area. His was the first work on Appalachian speech and came to be the most extensive collection of data on southern mountain language.

Hall published a number of books about the Smoky mountain region, most dealing with folklore and storytelling. In 1990, Michael Montgomery decided to use Hall's extensive work for this lexicographical volume and both men are credited as editors.

What made the book memoir for me was my initial thumbing through it. I decided to look up words that had ambushed me in my youth, words that an older relative had used that I would never hear coming out of Walter Cronkite's mouth.

I remembered my maternal grandmother saying of a man she did not care for, "Oh, he's always got a plug of tobacco in his mouth and that ambeer running down to his chin." Ambeer. Noun. Saliva colored brown by tobacco juice.

And there was my father's poke. Poke. Noun. A small paper container, a bag or sack.

And a friend of my paternal grandmother once showed me a picture of four hogs that when you folded it up a certain way made another picture—a head shot of Adolf Hitler. I offered to buy it from him but he said he didn't want to get "shed" of it. Shed of, shet of. See shut. Shut. B definition. Be rid of, be free from.

Each entry comes not only with a definition but also an example of usage, either from Hall's research or from a well-known reference work on the region such as Horace Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders. For example, here's one from the "shut" definition: "[H]e discoursed of the different varieties, and of how much this or that tree had borne, and of how he 'got shet of' the borers and other pests."

While the book limits itself mostly to the six counties (three in North Carolina and three in Tennessee) around the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, it reflects the speech patterns of the entire Appalachian region. For the most part it is a record of a language that is gone, or certainly going. And for that reason alone it is a wonderful source. It is also a testament to the inventiveness of the people of those mountains because it contains the vivid turns of speech they often used.

For anyone interested in either the southern mountains or the clever use of language, the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English is a delight.