From Idea to Word: Folk Beliefs and Customs Underlying Folk Speech

Abstract

W AORDS ARE THE MAGIC WINGS upon which man's ideas take flight.1 They may range from single prosaic words representing an object, an action, or an idea to phrases that enlarge, enhance, and even poetize the original ideas. As a field of study, words may claim the attention of the lexicographer, the rhetorician, the student of poetry, the proverb scholar, or the compiler of popular expressions found in a language, the so-called winged words. Folk speech moves on a somewhat humbler level but is, in some of its genres, not without its own symbolic and poetic qualities. That the field of folk speech should have attracted such a large number of students and scholars from the ranks of philology, dialectology, onomastics, folklore, and kindred disciplines is a tribute to the power of the word-not the word quite in the sense in which it is used in the first chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, but the word as the prime human mover. Here I should like to consider the word in a manner that will certainly not be new to most readers of American Speech. All members of the American Dialect Society who receive the Society's publications are no doubt impressed, as I have been, with the attempts on the part of fieldworkers and compilers of glossaries of local folk speech to supply all the background they can on every single item reported. It is from careful work of this kind that complete dictionary entries will be compiled for the Society's Dictionary of American Regional English. In the thought that American popular belief and folk custom contain much material that will be useful for the dictionary and for work in the field of folk speech generally, I suggest that greater attention be directed to these fertile sources.2 I have no new methodology to propose. I would simply urge the