Customer Reviews

The Dixie Dictionary

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Compiled and edited by southern journalist Thomas W. Howard, The Dixie Dictionary: An Introduction To The Southern Language is a fun, enjoyable, and useful glossary of terms unique to American Southern English dialects. From "all vine and no 'taters" (a phrase to describe someone who is all talk and no action) to "whistle-pig" (groundhog), The Dixie Dictionary is packed from cover to cover with wry, flavorful phrases that most northerners have likely never heard of. Highly recommended for writers looking to pen southern-style dialogue, as well as anyone planning to visit or move to the South, or who just wants to have a good time paging through some truly unique and eyebrow-raising expressions, The Dixie Dictionary is a welcome contribution to personal and academic Language Studies reference collections.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this dictionary. This is probably the richest collection of Southern words in print. It is true that there are few etymologies provided and the entries are all concise. However, I would much rather have the work as it stands as opposed to having only half the number of entries with a detailed analysis. In fact many of the most interesting entries (i.e. those petaining to untranslateable concepts) do have a longer explanation. There are many entries contained here which cannot be found in Robert Hendrickson's "Whistlin' Dixie". On the other hand, there are a few entries Hendrickson uses that cannot be found here. Hendrickson also provides a more detailed descritpion of each entry and perhaps has slightly more toponymous expressions. If you are in doubt as to which dictionary to buy then, if you really love this dialect of American English, I strongly recommend that you buy BOTH. The two important works on Southern speech complement the other and are both reasonably priced.
First of all, I would like to say that "The Dixie Dictionary" is extremely rich in folklore entries. For instance, there are fascinating terms like 'belling' (a wedding custom), 'dumb cake' (a cake made in silence and used for fortune telling) and 'infare' (a feast the day after the wedding). There are literally dozens of unique words pertaining to various kinds of legendary monsters such as the 'Bingbuffer', the 'clew bird' and the 'galoopus' etc. There are also words connected with folk healing like 'chamber lye', 'nanny tea' and 'fasting spittle' as well as call words used to command animals (e.g. 'coo-sheep/coon-nan' and 'sukee' , etc.). Folk expressions concerning the weather and seasons are also represented in entries like 'blackberry winter' and 'dogwood winter' etc.
There are also many terms taken from the Civil War like 'copperhead' (a Northerner/Yankee who sympathised with the South. There are many nicknames e.g. 'Rackensack' (someone from Arkansaw) and a 'Cracker' (someone either from Georgia or Florida) etc. in addition to toponymous phrases like the 'Carolina robin' (smoked herring), 'Charsleston eagle' (buzzard) and 'Arkansas toothpick' (bowie knife) etc.
Another category of terms which reflects the devout history of the people is the religious terminology like 'amen corner', 'pound' (party for a new preacher), 'toadstool churches' (which grow up as a result of revivals) and 'pokeweed religion' etc. There are also countless terms associated with tobacco, moonshine/whiskey and games like marbles. Several entries do not constitute distinct words as such but rather dialect variants/different pronunciation e.g. 'ovair' (over there), 'leben' (eleven) and 'zactly' (exactly). Talking of the last word 'zactly', dialectologists, will be interested to encounter certain similarities with some West Country British dialects (which often use 'z' in place of 's'). For instance, in the Cornish dialect (many terms of which are derived from an ancient language akin to Welsh not English) I recognised the following entries : 'ashcat', 'cap'n', 'kilt', 'emmet' (meaning ant - in West Cornwall it is 'muryan' yet 'emmet is used in E.Cornwall and in Devon), 'furmety' and 'rassle' etc. This leads me to postulate that Cornish miners may well have settled in some places in the South.If any fellow-readers would like to purchase a Cornish dialect dictionary then search on this site (there are good dictionaries available by Jago, Phillipps and Ivey). If they are not available in Amazon.com then try the Amazon.uk branch. As you can probably detect from my review, I found this work most interesting. It is an important contribution to the culture of the South and to dialectology.

Dixie Dictionary I found the book very useful to refresh my vocabulary for Southern speech. Being born in the south I should understand most of what is being said, however, I've worked in California for over twenty-five years and just returned home to find that I haven't a clue as to what people are telling me. I'm a shamed face southern boy who has to learn to talk Southern all over again. Now it's easy thanks to The Dixie Dictionary. It really is a funny informative book also a great tool for writers who need Southern speech in their stories.