Harpin' Boont in Boonville

The United States is a land of many languages, dialects, accents and vocabularies. English is not necessarily the first language of the American Indian or the Chinese American, the Spanish American or the American Jew, all of whom inherited ancient tongues. But apart from children's pig Latin and the pidgin English still employed occasionally in Hawaii, one of the oldest invented languages in the U.S. was devised and survives in the California hamlet of Boonville. TIME Correspondent Timothy Tyler visited there recently and tried to speak with the people. Here is his report.

The road had been hairpin turns through foggy mountains for the past 20 miles. All at once there was the sign: Boonville, pop. 1,003. Sure enough, there were some shacks along the road. No lights anywhere except the eerie blue glow of a television coming from one window. We stopped there, and after a minute one of the oldest men alive appeared. Stooped, toothless mouth indented, wearing glasses with handmade brass temples that could have been a hundred years old, he looked happy to have someone to talk to. We asked him about a place to stay. He looked surprised:

"You piked to boont in your moche geekin' on a motel?" he said. "Motel's strung, kimmie, but pike in the nook an' whittle a slib by the jeffer. Got enough zeese for a gormin' tidric. You from Belk?" We repeated our question, more slowly. He seemed to understand. "There's a nonch sluggin' nook ye can pike to," he said and gestured up the road. We thanked him and went back to our rented car, which wouldn't start. Finally, we walked the way he pointed, found the rickety New Boonville Hotel, roused a pale clerk, and were shown to a room where the floor had the solidity of a trampoline and the only decoration was a 1948 calendar from a Chinese laundry in San Francisco.

Link with the Past. Boonville is the Cannery Row of the '60s, a case study of isolated humanity intertwined with the land and the elements. It lies 100 miles north of San Francisco at the southern end of Mendocino County's Anderson Valley, a corridor 30 miles long that takes the Navarro River northwest to the Pacific. The southern half looks like Scotland: steep hills, lush fields dotted with sheep and shacks with wood smoke coming out of the chimneys. The valley is beautiful and silent. Two thousand people in maybe 150 square miles. Having few of the distractions of urban life, they see death clearly and have no urge to escape it. All they ask is a little sex, a little booze and a little humor in the meantime.

For more than half a century, their humor has come largely out of their exotic argot. It is their link now with a more exciting, more amusing past. We went back next morning to the house of the old man who spoke the language. His name is Phocian McGimsey, but everybody calls him Levi. He is 73. His grandfather came West to Boonville in 1852. He told us that the language is "Boontling," which is a corruption of Boonville Lingo. In English sprinkled with Boontling, Levi described what Boonville was like in those days: a rough frontier town first settled in the 1850s by subsistence farmers and sheep and cattle ranchers, most of them of Scotch-Irish descent.

Argot Born. One day in '92, sitting around the Anytime Saloon, Reg and Tom Burger and the Duff brothers started putting some of their old Scotch-Irish dialect words together with some on-the-spot code words into a language that the enemies--be they womenfolk, their rivals, their elders, their children--could not possibly understand. It caught on, rapidly losing its value as a code; soon "Boontlingers" and their friends were eagerly trying to shark (con) each other with new inventions.

It was more fun to call coffee zeese instead of coffee, because it recalled old Z.C., a cook who made coffee so strong you could float an egg on it. Or to call working ottin', after an industrious logger named Otto. To call a big fire in the grate a jeffer, because old Jeff Vestal always had a big fire going. To say charlie ball for embarrass, because old Charlie Ball, a local Indian, was so shy he never said a word. To say forbes, short for four bits, and tubes, for two bits. To call a phone a buckywalter after Walter Levi, known back then for having a phone at home. To say ball for good, because the old standard of quality was the Ball-Band shoe, with the red ball on the box.

Other words came right out of old Scotch-Irish dialect--wee for small, kimmie for man, tweed for young man, deek for look at. Still other words were borrowed from the Porno Indians, who moved off to a reservation after an early settler set up his general store in the middle of their camping ground. A few words are corruptions of French, like gorm (gourmand) for eat.

Gorming has its full terminology. Pie is charlie brown because the latter had to have pie at every meal. Dom is chicken, after the Dominique, a particular breed. Broadie is a cow or a steak. Gano is the name of a very hard kind of apple they used to grow in the valley and, by extension, Boontling for all apples. Bacon is bowrp (a contraction of boar pig), eggs are easters, as in "If I don't shy to the sluggin' region [sleeping place] soon, I may as well set me a jeffer and gorm bowrp and casters."

For a child learning his nursery rhymes, Old Mother Hubbard would go like this: "The old dame piked for the chigrel nook/ For gorms for her ball belljeemer;/ The gorms had shied, the nook was strung,/ And the ball belljeemer had neemer."* Then there were the code names for nonch (not-nice) subjects. To go to bed with a girl was to burlap her, because one day in the 1890s someone walked into the general store, found no clerk, checked the storeroom and found him making love to a young lady on a pile of sacks. The word caught on, although it got competition from ricky-chow, an onomatopoeic description of the twanging bedsprings in the Boonville Hotel's honeymoon suite.

Some of the language was developed to cushion tragedy: everybody feared having their sheep frozen or starved by a sudden change in the weather. That was too big a disaster just to report baldly, so they would say "That frigid perel [cold rain, which resembles little pearls] made many white spots [dead lambs]. There'll be nemer croppies [no more sheep, which crop the grass] come boche season [boche, meaning deer, is derived from a Pomo word]."

Boontling was in full bloom between 1900 and 1940. "We would make fun of the visitors when the mail stage came through every three weeks," recalls Levi. "They all thought we was crazy. I spoke Boontling ever since I could talk. When they drafted me in '17, I had to learn to talk English all over again."

With bad times in the '30s, some of the Boonters lost their sense of humor, and the number of Boontlingers declined. In the '40s, when a logging boom began, the population of Boonville temporarily tripled to 3,000. This was the first real influx of new people from the outside world since the town was settled, and the strangers dealt the language another blow. Television also has brought change, as Boonters soak up pernicious English from the machines.

Now Boontling is spoken by only a minority of Boonters. They have a club that meets every other week in one of the members' houses to harp (speak). There are 20 members, though more like 200 harp and understand. Mack Miller, in his 60s, drives down from Ukiah, a larger town on the coast, "because I'm tonguecuppy [sick] when there's nemer to harp Boont with." The local highway patrolman, a young fellow who lives up the valley in the state park, has picked up Boontling and started to lose his tenuous grasp of the mother tongue. "You're arking the jape-way," he said to a stranger recently. "Sorry, I mean you're blocking the driveway." They predict that the cop will start attending meetings soon.

But codgiehood, their word for old age, is overtaking most of the Boontlingers. The oldtimers--Wee Ite and Buzzard, and Fuzz and Deekin', Wee Tumps and Highpockets, and Iron Mountain, Skeeter and Sandy--are dwindling. They are saying their last sayings in Boont: "A dom in the dukes is bailer than dubs in the sham [bush]." A couple of dude ranches have sprung up in the valley, and just a year ago, for the first time ever, a bank dared open a branch in once-woolly Boonville. The end is near.

* Piked is went, chigrel is food, book is place, belljeemer is hound or dog, which comes from beljeek, the word for rabbit (a corruption of Belgian hare), plus a suffix that makes it a rabbit dog, shied is gone away, strung is dead or empty.

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