Frederic Cassidy; Lexicographer of U.S. Folk Idioms

Frederic Cassidy was so mad about words that he once made up one to describe himself. He was, by his creative reckoning, a “lexicolator,” or word worshiper.

Cassidy, who died June 14 at 92 in Madison, Wis., devoted most of his career to cataloging American folk idioms for a mammoth work in progress called the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Among lexicographers, Cassidy was as highly esteemed as Sir James Murray of the Oxford English Dictionary, a monumental work embracing the entire English language.

What made Cassidy’s blood run hot were not standard words, like “pillow” or “umbrella,” but unusual, evocative ones, like “honeyfuggle” (a Kentucky term for sweet talk) and “flang-dang” (Texas twist on party with music).

Cassidy and a dedicated research team spent decades recording and collating such colorful signposts of regional America for a groundbreaking, five-volume work that has been more than 100 years in the making and isn’t finished yet.

“I have something to live for,” Cassidy said in 1991 when he was 84 and the second volume had just been released. He predicted it would take the remainder of the century to complete the ambitious project.

His prediction was off: By century’s end, only three volumes were done. Volume 4 is expected in 2002 and Volume 5 in 2007. By then, Cassidy’s folk-word miners will have covered 70,000 words and meanings.

“We all thought this would be done a whole lot faster than it has been,” he confessed several years ago. But lexicography, Cassidy once deadpanned, “is not a rapid science.” His best-known book before he took on the regional English work was a single-volume dictionary of Jamaican Creole English. That took him 16 years.

“He was a pure optimist. And it’s a good thing he was or this project would never have gotten off the ground,” said Joan Houston Hall, who will succeed Cassidy as chief editor for the American dictionary project.

The idea for the dictionary was as old as the American Dialect Society, which was founded in 1889. But not much progress was made until the early 1960s, when the society chose Cassidy to be the editor.

The group handed him seven decades’ worth of word lists--about 40,000 folk words and expressions. Cassidy regarded the collection as a good start but decided that the next step was data collection in all 50 states.

That took five years. Fieldworkers armed with a questionnaire designed by Cassidy and Audrey Duckert, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts, interviewed 2,752 American natives in 1,002 communities. Each respondent answered a bookful of questions--1,847 in all.

They prodded for things such as this: “Words or expressions used around here about a very slow person.”

The result: 302 ways to describe a slowpoke, including “like coal tar running up a hill,” “slow as fleas falling off a dead dog” and “slow as cream a-rising.”

For something as mundane as a dust ball, 176 names were conjured--dust bunnies, dust puppies, dust tigers and collywobbles.

Other entries were not as voluminous, but were too rich to pass up.

When something is fishy, why not declare, as black speakers in the South were inclined to say, “There’s a dead cat on the line.”

If you’ve got the jitters, adopt the saying reported by a speaker in Knoxville, Tenn.: “I’ve got the fum-fidgets and hoo-daddles.”

If you’re recommending the latest blockbuster by your favorite author, steer clear of the overused “It’s a great read.” Try instead, as some speakers in the Northeast might say, “This is a humgumptious book.”

A personal favorite of Cassidy was “hooftie,” found in a suburban Philadelphia newspaper article that said the police were having trouble with the hoofties. Cassidy’s team of word detectives traced the term’s origins to Pennsylvania’s German community. “Hufte” in German means hip. So, Cassidy concluded, “hoofties were hippies. The police . . . were having trouble with hippies.”

Why bother with words that may might sound nonsensical and have limited use? Cassidy believed that dictionaries exist not only to record proper or standard words but also any term that conveys meaning. “If a meaning is communicated,” he said, “the word is real.”

Cassidy’s fascination with language was easy to trace. He was born in Jamaica, the son of an accountant and university professor, and grew up speaking two kinds of English--standard English at home and Creole in the community.

He moved with his family to Akron, Ohio, when he was 11 but returned to Jamaica many times. In 1967, after studying in Jamaica as a Fulbright research fellow, he wrote the Dictionary of Jamaican English.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1930 and master’s in 1932 from Oberlin College. He received his doctorate in 1938 from the University of Michigan, where he met and married a fellow student, Helene Lucile Monod. She died in 1980. His survivors include four children and a sister.

In 1939, he began teaching English and literature at the University of Wisconsin. Although officially retired for more than a decade, he maintained an office there and continued to direct the work of a 13-member staff, regularly entertaining them with his knowledge of limericks, puns and double-entendres.

If he ever encountered a word with mysterious origins, he could be relied on to make this response:

“Let’s look it up.”