Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, and today I am here with Joan Houston Hall,

former president of the American Dialect Society, former president of the Dictionary Society of North America,

and longtime editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, better known as Dare, and that's what we're going to talk about today.

Joan, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Well, thank you very much.

You bet. I am so excited to have you here because Dare is just one of the funnest.

You know, my listeners might not like me saying funnest, but I think it's one of the funnest dictionary projects out there, one of the funnest language projects.

Can you tell people sort of what kinds of words go into Dare?

Well, we consider a word to be regional. If it is someplace in the U.S., whether that's a tiny portion of a state, even part of a

city, a region of several states, most of the country, but not everywhere. We also consider

things to be regional if they are what we call folk.

That is, things that you wouldn't find in standard dictionaries, but people use just in their

everyday lives.

So a lot of those are the particularly fun words.

And I agree, it's the funest dictionary around.

And does it include slang? We try not to include slang because by definition, slang is very

ephemeral. If your teenage kids use it and then all of a sudden their 10-year-old

sibling uses it, they stop because it's

an in-group kind of thing and it lets you know what group you're part of. But when others start

budging in on it, then no longer is it functioning as it should. So these words are regional,

but durable as well then?

Yes.

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