Please Help Save the Dictionary of American Regional English

The Dictionary of American Regional English is a fifty year long project dedicated to collecting and preserving the richness and flavor of the American language. The Dictionary published the volume containing entries for the letter "Z" just last year. Since then, the staff has been working on supplements and preparing an online digital version, which will make the DARE available to many more people and make it easy to update the Dictionary more frequently.

A worthy project and a fun one! Take a trip to a library that has a copy and enjoy yourself (caution: don't do it if you've got a lot of stuff to do that day). But the DARE is in trouble. Several foundations that once supported it have moved their funding to other projects, individual donations have slowed down, and the project lost $50,000.00 in Federal grants when the sequester went into effect. The University of Wisconsin, where the project lives, has endured "grave reductions" in state support. Here's a recent article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the problem.

Point is, this is a great project on the ropes. Already, the staff have received layoff notices to take effect July 1, 2013. The Dictionary of American Regional English needs our support right now. I've contributed $100.00 this morning in memory of my uncle, George Goldman, who was a lover of words. The Dictionary needs about $250,000.00 to keep the full staff on through the end of 2013, and about $400,000.00 to keep the project going in 2014. Please give them a few bucks if you possibly can.

Here's a link to a secure page at the University of Wisconsin Foundation website. Please make a donation to keep the Dictionary alive, and pass this on to your friends who love words and American culture. Donate to the Dictionary of American Regional English

The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology

See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsI first read The Masks of God, Vol. 1: Primitive Mythology when it was quite new back at good old Kalamazoo College around 1970. I was pretty new, too, back then. I was certainly supposed to be studying something else. Political Science, with Dr. Flesche, perhaps. (I loathed that course AND that professor.)

I devoured the first three of four volumes at a gulp. I bogged down in Volume 4, Creative Mythology, which is about the play of mythology in western culture. I've never reread it, but it's on the list now because it's all about Wagner and other art that has become crucial to me as an adult.

I was a compulsive and slapdash reader in my youth and missed a lot, besides just being too damn young and inexperienced to understand much. Campbell's style can be a bit tortuous, but the book repays careful reading. Here's a section that amused me very much this morning.

He's writing about what he calls "the Imprints of Experience"; the common framework of human life at a physical and experiential level that underlays all of mythology and culture. This passage is taken from the section called "The Structuring Force of Life on Earth," which considers phenomena like gravity, day and night, the sun and the moon, and of course, the Big One:

See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsThe contrast in physical form and spheres of competence of the male and female surely is another universal of human experience; and we must reckon also, in this context, with the "instinct crossing" between the two, which makes possible - or rather, inevitable, and sometimes even against better judgment - the awakening of the two bodies in synchronization to that curious mutual engagement which the Freudians like to call a "re-enactment of the primal scene," and which many have found to be the one consummation of appetite most difficult to resist. In a number of meticulous studies of animal behavior it has been shown that a trimly meshed sequence of sign stimuli, flashed from the male organism to the female and from the female to the male, can be identified as releasers of the sometimes exceedingly complicated performances that must be undertaken in perfect synchronization before the species can be reproduced; and I do not know anyone outside of the most carefully schooled scientific circles who would suppose for a moment that a comparable criss-cross of isomorphs might not safely be assumed to exist on the human level as well. But since nothing is to be assumed recklessly on the basis of merely personal experience, and no one has yet been able to raise two young human beings in absolute isolation from social conditioning and introduce them to each other when the moon is full, we shall not presume to say how much of what everyone knows about this matter is due to imprint, or how much to inherited image. Let us remark only that the perfumes of flowers, the beautification of the body, night, secret meetings, music, token exchanges, anguish, remorse, rivalry, jealousy, murder, and the whole opera, can be identified in human history as far as our eyes can see. (Primitive Mythology, 1969, pgs 58-59)

Photo Credit: Steve Wilson - need to up my game via Compfight ccLater, when I lived in Brooklyn, I would watch the Nature series on PBS and imagine reproductive strategies for New Yorkers as elaborate as the ones some of the animals in the shows undertook. It seemed to me that nubile Outer Borough females would have to, for example, show up on a certain block in Brooklyn on moonlit nights shod in platform shoes and wearing gold chains and Jordache jeans and drink Pina Coladas in order to reproduce successfully. Oh, wait...

The complexity of our reproductive lives, measured in time, space, poetry, and music (what Campbell snarkily calls "the whole opera"), is quite enough for me. 

I'll write more about The Masks of God as I proceed through the books.

The Masks of God, Vol. 1: Primitive Mythology