Positive Anymore

There's this grammatical construction that's used in the Midland sub-dialect of Appalachian English. (Which would happen to be my dialect. See above where Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia meet up—Hatfield-McCoy territory.)

I bet you right here, right now that this construction is not in your dialect. Or maybe you've heard it, but it sounds confusing, marginal, even ungrammatical. Shall we say—hillbilly speech. It's called the Positive Anymore and it's perfectly grammatical and understandable in Appalachia. Some examples:

Maybe I shouldn't even bring this up, but does anyone else wonder
 whether the missing arm has anything to do with a snake?

He's up to that snake-handler church an awful lot anymore.

Yeah, hon, that's pretty much how I felt
the first 17 years of my life there, too.

Tammy been landin' five, six catfish a day anymore.













These Positive Anymore constructions indicate that "it used NOT to be, but is now." The adverb nowadays can replace anymore in these forms. Make the substitution in the captions above and you'll have standard grammatical expressions with the same meaning expressed by the Positive Anymore.

This is contrasted with the much more common usage and wide-spread distribution (including in Standard American English) of the Ordinary Anymore construction. Bet you right here, right now, you've got this one, where anymore appears exclusively in negative constructions to mean "it used to be but isn't now."

Lonnie ain't afraid of that ol' rooster anymore.*

.........
* Note however that in Appalachian, no more is most likely to appear in the Ordinary Anymore sentences. (Lonnie ain't afraid of that ol' rooster no more.) This may have to do with distinguishing the positive and negative, since both constructions appear in this dialect.
.........

Like many features of my home dialect, Positive Anymore presumably comes from Scots-Irish where it is still extant today. Most Appalachian settlers on my end of the mountains were Scots-Irish, and for that matter, I'm Scots-Irish on my father's side.

You can see by the syntactic and semantic regularity, and the history and linguistic origins of Positive Anymore that it is not an inferior, "uneducated" speech pattern, as so much of the Appalachian dialect is considered to be. It's an old, established feature from a major source of Standard English. Dialects develop differently. It's how they get to be separate dialects. (READ: We ain't the hillbillies y'inze think we is.)

To wrap this up, here's a beautiful little exchange between me and son Asa (who has a mainly Boston/New England dialect) that shows the potential cross-dialect confusion. It's why, anymore, I've been giving this some thought again.

                    Asa and the Positive 'Anymore'

Asa was wondering if we might start getting cable TV.

I thought about it:  Well, you do like a lot of stuff on tv anymore.

[pause]

Asa:  Are you saying I don't like it anymore?

Me:  No, I'm saying you do like it anymore.

 
[pause]

Asa (clearly confused):  But that says something... negative... right...?

Appalachia again. Please bear with me.

  mountain dialect

 kick = "die"
That musta been back when Aunt Hattie kicked.
NOTE: This is not considered disrespectful in the dialect. 
 

 I don't know why I've felt compelled to think about and write about my childhood in Appalachia. It may have something to do with my mother dying earlier this year. Come to think of it, she must have kicked right around the time I started this blog. Yes, I think I've hit upon the origins of my current preoccupation.

Some of the photos below were taken in the 70s when I was growing up there. Some are more current. All of them are gathered from the internet. I have several photos taken by me and my family that I wish I could use instead. I inherited albums and boxes of these photos, but I haven't had the heart yet to look through them.

 mountain dialect

 let on = "to pretend"

He let on 'e was gone to meetin' but 'e wasn't, he was gone fishin'.

This is also used as in Standard English: "to reveal." 

He never did let on 'e was from the county office.

Strangely, the two meanings are opposed.

 

The photo above shows what the residential areas of Byesville looked like when I was a child. Come to think of it, it shows what Byesville looks like nowadays, too. 

I lived in town until we moved to a more rural area "out in the township." There, you might not have a neighbor closer than a couple of miles down the road. 

Above right is downtown Byesville. It's been boarded up since probably the mid-80s. There on the left, with the green front, was my father's grocery store. On the right is the Dan-Dee Bar that has this sign—I swear to god—handwritten on the side of it:

No Lofeing

Police Pattroled

They let on like Byesville actually has police, but I don't think there have been any since the 70s–80s. There was only ever one policeman anyway. You just called him at home. All the time I can remember, it was Johnny Reid, 685–6620. (Not so impressive that I remember it—you only have to know the last four digits.) Officer Reid was a real nice man. He was at the school crossing for us twice a day and he sure was nice to us kids. He told us jokes and showed us tricks with his gun and stuff.

 mountain dialect
 to give someone the what-for = "to tell someone off"; "to chastise"
I'm aimin' to give that boy the what-for if 'e don't git himse'f in here!

This might as well be me and my family when all us cousins were little. Though I was an only child, my parents had 19 siblings between them and almost all had five or six kids. We once counted that I had 57 first cousins. And I don't think all my aunts and uncles were done procreating.

This photo at left could have been taken in the 70s or now. This is a typical Appalachian home. Drive around the old roads and you'll see scores of families living like this. I knew a family that lived in an old abandoned post office out on County Road 13.

The boy in the foreground here I could swear was Butch Rudd, one of our neighbors. (Given name: Clayton.) That'd be a sister or cousin on the threshold.

When Clayton Rudd was 16, he kissed me, way up on a mountain behind my house where we went at his insistence. I must have been... oh, 11 or 12. I felt sick. Afterwards, I just kept spitting on the ground, over and over. As soon as I come down off that mountain, I ran and told my mother about it and you can bet she gave ol' Clayton the what-for!

********* 

mountain dialect

 a-prefixing
We knew they was a-comin', 'fore they did.

 Mary Belle Littleton Long

I took this picture of my mother just a few

years ago. She's in her early 70s here. 

She was still giving me the what-for.
The last thing she said to me, as she 
lay in the hospital, was:

Don't you come back in here 

a-visitin' tonight.  I gotta get some rest!

In the morning she was already gone when I got there.

The Valley Girl Lift

I'm trying to train Asa away from Sentence Lifting? But he doesn't even seem aware that he does it? And now he's getting annoyed with me? But not as annoyed as I am with sentence lifting?

You can get anywhere from here.
Just not where you were planning.

The 80s were my college years—the whole decade. (Hey, I went to grad school.) And that effectively makes the 80s my decade. During that time, I lived in Southern California.

When Frank and Moon Zappa hit the radio waves with the song "Valley Girl," well, ha ha ha, we all laughed. Yes, with LA/San Diego our playground, it was the wicked truth that there were plenty of girls we knew who sounded exactly like that.

As you may recall—depending on where you were in the 80s—
Moon Zappa provided the voice of the "Valley Girl."

Lindsay Lohan, the quintessential
Valley Girl, at Sherman Oaks Galleria.
 (You can't see Linds because she's inside.) 

Like, OH MY GOD!?

Like,TOTALLY,

Encino is, like, 
SO BITCHIN?

There's, like, the Galleria?

And, like, all these, like, 
really great shoe stores?
I love going into, like, 
clothing stores and stuff?
I, like, buy the neatest mini-skirts and stuff?

It's, like, so BITCHIN cuz, 
like, everybody's, like,
super-super nice...?
It's, like, so BITCHIN...

 Hear Moon for yourself, if you must:

She's a valley girl,

She's a valley girl,
She's a valley girl,
  She's a...                
  

I don't think we'd have been quite so cavalier about valley girl speech if we'd known that more than twenty years later our children would talk like that as a matter of course. God help us all, but especially me.

As a grammarian, I know that lifting the tone at the end of a sentence—interrogative or declarative—is supposed to indicate that you are asking a question for which you expect an answer. The lifting phenomenon in valley girl speech—and the recently emergent valley boy speech (see: Asa)—seems to  ask for confirmation of the listener's attention. If that's true, then it's analogous to Standard English "tag questions."  Fredrick lives on the island, right? You know they'll be hunting, don't you?

Linguistic research indicates that women use tag questions far more than men. And the valley girl lift has been almost exclusively a female speech pattern until recently. It's still far more widely found in the speech of girls and women than men and boys. 

One might suggest that it's because women can never really be sure that men are listening.

He's a good boy.
He fears me.

But Asa WILL listen to me about this sentence lifting...? Or, like, I won't stand for it?  

An Unkindness of Ravens

Are ravens cranky? Are they actually unkind? Does unkindness have a semantic link??

An unkindness is the official collective noun for ravens in English. I bet if I point out an "unkindness of ravens" in the park one day, my friend Sandra will be enchanted. (She's very enthusiastic about learning new things, and also easily enchanted.)

Other collective nouns (or quantifiers) are so commonly used that we no longer analyze them. The phrase becomes a whole, not just the sum of its parts—like an idiom. When you hear the idiom "let the cat out of the bag," do you picture cats in, and then out of, bags? No. Here are some collective nouns that are similarly transparent in use:

• a pride of lions

• an army of ants

• a school of fish

School of Fish

 

Home-Schooled Fish

 

 

 

 

Montessori School of Fish

But if you do analyze the common examples, they're as imaginative and charming as a "murder of crows" and a "float of crocodiles." A pride, an army, a school? Where did such quaint quantifiers
come from?

Heck, I don't know. But below are some that are official in English and yet, huh??

Smack! Oh, sorry. Smack! Oops. Hey!

• a glaring of cats—Someone not-very-cat-liking was being wicked clever there.

• a smack of jellyfish—Got me. Maybe you really have to  know jellyfish for that one to work.

• a knot of frogs—It skeeves me just to picture this. Brr.

• a piteousness of doves—Is piteousness even a word, on its own?



You can make up your own collective nouns. (Talk about idiosyncratic.) Here are some of mine:

What if I want whitening,
fluoride protection, tartar control,
healthy gums, AND plaque removal?
Will they not all fit in one tube?

• My son got an arsenal of video games for Christmas.

• There was a slag heap of laundry to sort. (Those who didn't grow up near a coal mine may not get this.)

• I went to the store to get toothpaste and was stopped short by a confrontation of choices.

• A pubescence of middle-schoolers came pouring out of the classrooms.

• The restaurant was filled with a gallery of gay men.

—and, what I think is my best effort so far:

• Onto the field marched a potluck of lesbians....

"She always brings that."