Appalachian LanguageI find language and how it evolves f...

 Appalachian Language

I find language and how it evolves fascinating. Part of that might be due to my Appalachian background. For years, Appalachia was an isolated pocket that maintained the language landed down from the Old Country longer than the rest of the country. Terminology resembling Elizabethan English was spoken there well into the twentieth century. In fact, I heard some of it as late as the 1980s.

Google says Americans are and were more likely to call the piece of dining room furniture a sideboard than a buffet, yet my parents called it by the older term, a buffet. When I took some college courses a few years ago, a literature class studied a Renaissance-era play that included the term "fly flap." None of the other students knew what it meant, but my mother often used the term, especially in the summer. It means a fly swatter.

Some other common words that are familiar to me, and perhaps to you, that directly came from Renaissance England are afeared (afraid), britches (pants, trousers), poke (bag), sallet (wild greens prepared like collards), yonder (over there), reckon (think or suppose), hit (it), and right smart (a lot). There are many more. I've used these in writing the dialect for my novels set in the Appalachian Mountain. Refer to last week's blog, and check them out.

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