Talking about Words: Local Language
Prof. Richard Bailey
We all have 'local knowledge' of our language
Some years ago I entertained an academic visitor from Missouri,
and we drove off together to a meeting in Detroit.
As we neared our destination, my friend looked at the road sign
over the expressway and said: “What in the world is Gee Dee
River?”
“Why 'Grand River',” I replied, hardy imaging
that the sign—“Gd River Av”—could present
a puzzle to anyone.
(In fine pedantic style, I then discoursed on
Judge Augustus Woodward's
great master plan for the streets of Detroit, a tale that to my
friend's relief, was cut short by our arrival.)
All of us have a great deal of encoded special knowledge, and sometimes
we don't realize just how special it is. As a life-long resident
of southeast Michigan, there has been nothing special to me about
the names on the landscape. They are what they are.
Saline rhymes with ravine; Milan with filin'; Clio and Mio with silo.
The Ile and the Isle in Grosse Ile and Presque
Isle rhymes with feel and not file. Grosse Pointe has
two terminal Es, both silent.
In the summer of 2000, in imitation of the “Cows on Parade” happening
in Chicago, Grand Rapids launched the installation at its zoo of
4-foot-tall fiberglass rabbits decorated by artists. The linguistic
foundation of the joke was the fact that some locals pronounce their
city as if it were spelled “Grand Rabbits.” Mostly the
locals didn't get the point of the rabbits/rapids joke
since they imagine these words to be distinct. The out-of-towners
got it right away. More encoded special knowledge.
Last summer, we were in Mackinaw City picking up a dozen frozen pasties to
bring home, and the person ahead of me in line said: “I'd
like two of those”—pointing at the pricelist on the counter.
Here was someone who knew a piece of encoded special
knowledge when she saw it, and she didn't want to come down
on the side of rhyming it with either hasty or vasty in
pronouncing pasty, so
she let her finger do the picking.
“Pasty,” I laughed, and so did she.
“We're from Ohio.”
I shook my head from side to side, sympathetically.
In the 1970s, there was a wonderful story about a man from Ypsilanti
who was found in Florida with a wife and small children. Somehow
the police had identified him as a missing person, and they brought
him back to Michigan to confront the wife and medium-sized children
he had left behind.
“Amnesia,” he said. All he could remember from 10 years
earlier was wandering beside a wrecked car in Tennessee, and, despite
all his efforts, he couldn't learn who he had been before.
He made the best of the loss of his memory and so married and multiplied.
“That can't be true,” asserted the detective. “If
you'd lost your memory, you'd say ' yip -suh-lanti' instead
of ' ip -suh-lanni.'”
“OK,” said the bigamist. “You've got me.”
The detective played a smart trick. Memory loss might very well
dispose of an inconvenient wife and noisy children long before getting
to the encoded special knowledge of the pronunciation of a place.
All of us have this kind of special knowledge
but different pieces of it. Some people know that Sault and Soo are pronounced the same. (The first spelling is the
city and the rapids in the St. Mary's; the second is the
spelling of the locks.) Some people know that Mackinaw and Mackinac are pronounced the same. (Most don't know that Great Lakes
merchant mariners say “mack -uh-nack” for both and
landlubbers say “mack-un-naw.”)
There's lots of finely nuanced local knowledge.
Undergraduates from Michigan tend to have a more nasal “A” in “Ann
Arbor” than out-of-state ones. Michigan students go mano-a-mano
with out-staters over whether it is right to say pop or soda.
Michigan students think they speak just like the broadcasters and
don't like learning that they don't. If you point out
the nasality in “Arbor,” it makes them uncomfortable.
Special encoded knowledge makes up a big piece of who we are.
Editors Note: When you order a pasty, make it rhyme with 'vasty'.
 Richard
W. Bailey is the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor
of English. His most recent book is Rogue Scholar: The
Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff,
University of Michigan Press, 2003 - a biography of an American
thief, impostor, murderer and would-be philologist who lived from
1821 to1871. It was published by the University
of Michigan Press in August.
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