Word: dialects
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like masters of more exalted arts, Cartoonist Walt Kelly succeeded in turning an imaginary landscape into a public preserve. With pen and wit he put together the world of Pogo, an inspired amalgam of bogs, hollow stumps, hog-jowl dialect and cheery absurdity. There, over 150 anthropomorphic critters gnawed away at the English language, baring kernels of political meaning, and carried on not-so-innocent satires of human pomposity. Phineas T. Bridgeport, the Barnum of bears, orated in billboard letters that burlesqued hucksterism everywhere. "Nuclear physics ain't so new and it ain't so clear," declared Rowland...
...Pogo. Pogo began taking shape during World War II. Kelly served as a civilian with the Army's foreign-language unit, where he picked up a special affection for the Southern dialect that was to become the patois of Pogo. (Though Kelly began using the Okefenokee setting in cartoons in 1942, he did not visit the swamp until 1955.) In 1948 he joined the short-lived New York Star as art director, editorial adviser and political cartoonist; he also donated Pogo strips to the impoverished paper. The Star folded the following year, but Pogo survived in the New York...
Harvard waged a diabolical war on my dialect and speech patterns that was both morally and aesthetically wrong. I had to choose between being a Southern girl who was somehow a Cliffie and being a Radcliffe Eliza Dolittle who felt terribly out of place and uncomfortable. It was either a "dyahlemmah" or a "dulimma" but I lost either...
Because the territory is home to hundreds of tribes and has nearly 500 different dialects, it struck some members of the Papua New Guinea Executive Council that a new national name might plausibly come from pidgin-the colorful fractured English (mirror, for example, is glas bilong lukluk) that has become the lingua franca of the area. To test popular reaction, the council recently decided to name the proposed national airline Air Niugini. Papuans complained that this might be a happy solution for New Guineans but it was a slight to them. Not so, said the council. Besides being pidgin, niugini...
Bilingualism is one of the few positive inheritances of Strasbourg's checkered past. Almost everyone speaks both German and French, as well as the local throat-curdling dialect. Strasbourg's stay-at-homes need only change a channel for a new language experience. They get the three German TV channels on their sets as well as the three French ones. With a bit of antenna fiddling they can also pick up Swiss and Luxembourg television, although it is hard to imagine why they would want...