Hero Wordship

That familiar long sandwich crammed with a meal's worth of edibles--what is it called? In New York it is a hero sandwich; in the South, it is known, unheroically, as a poor boy. Pennsylvanians call it a hoagie, New Englanders a grinder and Floridians a Cuban sandwich.

Such are the discoveries of University of Wisconsin English Professor Emeritus Frederic Cassidy, 71, who so far has spent 13 years laboring to complete the first comprehensive dictionary of American regionalisms. Financed by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities as well as private foundations, Cassidy and a staff of eight editors at the University of Wisconsin are slowly sifting American literature and records of interviews with 2,752 native Americans in 1,002 communities. The team has nearly finished editing the letter F. First conceived in 1889, the dictionary, which will include 60,000 entries, is to be published in four volumes during the 1980s by Harvard University's Belknap Press.

Unlike Webster's, Cassidy's will not seek to offer a standardized version of the language; its gaze is fixed instead on linguistic oddities too localized to win general acceptance. For example, Cassidy has discovered that in various parts of the U.S. a heavy rain is called a duck drencher, a chunk floater, a clod roller, a toad strangler and a goose drownder. False teeth are known colloquially as snappers, plaster pearls, chow chompers and china clippers. The term baby carriage is now used nationally, but baby coach is a popular variation in Mid-Atlantic states and baby buggy is used in the Midwest and West.

Cassidy takes issue with the critics of American English who fear that the language is becoming, well, as soggy as a hoagie in a goose drownder. "I defy anybody to prove that language is deteriorating," insists he. "It's still changing all the time, and it's as varied and alive as it's always been."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.