Blind Tigers and Manniporchia

By Ezra Bowen

In the world of Frederic Cassidy, ABC is anything but simple. Cassidy, 77, demonstrated that last week when Belknap/Harvard University Press published the first volume (A-C) of his unique Dictionary of American Regional English, its 1,056 pages bulging with bits of vernacular from A, as in a-coming, to czezski, the word around old Chicago for a Czech or Bohemian (also butchsky). In its scope and thoroughness, Cassidy's dictionary is unmatched as a kind of refuge for colloquialisms threatened with extinction, largely by the homogenizing influence of television.

From scattered western literature, for example, Cassidy has gleaned the definition of an Arizona tenor as a coughing tubercular. In Georgia, an Arab, pronounced Ay-rab in the northern part of the state and slurred to Urb in the south, can mean an urchin, while for some Baltimoreans, an Ay-rab is a bookie who operates out of his pocket on the street. To a Missouri youngster, Boston can be a marbles game in which the shooter need not knuckle down, but to a Pacific Northwest Indian, a Boston was any white American. And in a black ghetto like Watts or Harlem, conk means to straighten a person's hair with a lye solution, reports Cassidy, as well as carrying the more universal connotation of hitting "someone hard, esp on the head."

These and more than 12,000 other nuances of meaning and pronunciation have prompted Lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, co-editor of the landmark Dictionary of American Slang and editor in chief of Random House's reference- book department, to proclaim Cassidy's work one of the "major publishing events of decades."

Cassidy is a Jamaican native who learned both English and Creole, developing a rich feeling for words and a sensitivity to the nuances of language well before he moved with his family to the U.S. in 1919. Now a professor emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin, he began putting together a team of more than 100 fieldworkers and editors for his dictionary as long ago as 1963. Building on a trove of 40,000 folk words donated by the American Dialectic Society, he dispatched his researchers to tape more than 1,000 interviews with homeborn locals in all 50 states, working from a list of 1,847 questions. Sample: "When a firecracker doesn't go off and you break it in the middle and light the powder, you call it a ----." The answer in New York City: "Corpse-maker." Atop these replies the Cassidy team piled phrases and phonations from local newspapers, diaries, letters, the Federal Writers' Project state guide series and such other reference works as the Linguistic Atlas of New England. It also scoured more than 500 books of regional literature, including William Faulkner's The Reivers, which contributed one of Cassidy's favorites, bobbasheely, a Deep South word of Indian derivation meaning a very close friend. Out of the resulting mountain of some 2.5 million items, Cassidy and four editors selected the gems for Volume I (which sells for a hefty $49.95) and the four sequels that are now planned.

Writers, etymologists and other devotees of verbal arcana have never been given a richer browsing ground. But while they are discovering that a blind tiger is a place to buy and drink moonshine, or that there are 176 names for dust balls under the bed, they are also bound to be awed by the dictionary's staggering scholarship. Virtually every entry is meticulously catalogued for its geographic roots, first recorded usage, evolution of meaning and the most subtle shading of sound. Pronunciation Editor James Hartman particularly prizes manniporchia, a northern Maryland word for the DTs. The dictionary's investigators traced it to the Latin mania a potu, meaning craziness from drink, with the r tossed in from the habitual inflection of the region. "The detective work involved is exciting--to weird people," says Hartman. The white-haired Cassidy, already hard at the second volume and, despite his years, determined to see the heroic work through to the end, puts himself among the nuts. "I'm mad about words," he says, pleased as a basketful of possum-heads (1906, northwest Arkansas . . . Rare).

With reporting by Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago