I've recently finished Stephen King's Doctor Sleep - a good book, but not one I plan to review here for the recommended books category. While reading it, I encountered five colloquial phrases that were new to me, which I offer here for your consideration and comments (italics mine):
"People laugh their asses off and burn yea film, takin pitchers. Watch this."
I've heard "yea" used to illustrate a size description ("we caught one nice walleye - it was about yea big") when some other maneuver with the hands or fingers is used to define the object. I've never heard it used in the manner of the sentence above.
"Once away from I-80 and out in the toolies, they spread apart..."
When I lived in Kentucky, the corresponding local phrase was "out in the boonies [boondocks]." Surprisingly, my dictionary says "boondock" is derived from a word in the Tagalog (Austronesian) language ! Where does "toolies" come from?
"She went into the bathroom for another glass of water because her mouth still tasted blick..."
Easy to understand; seems almost onomatopoeic for the action of a tongue being stuck out.
"Nothing to it. Easy as knitting kitten-britches, as Momo liked to say."
This was unfamiliar even to our resident expert cat-lady.
"The key to survival in the world of rubes was to look as if you belonged, as if you were always on the goodfoot..."
We recently discussed being "left-footed," and "wrong-footed" would be not unfamiliar, but to be "on the goodfoot" was new and unexpected to me.
It's possible that some of these are neologisms coined by the author, but I suspect for the most part they are common colloquial phrases, though perhaps of a regional (or sub-regional) nature, maybe even restricted to the area near Maine. Please feel free to chime in with a Comment if you have some experience with these words and phrases.
"Out in the toolies" could be a reference to tule marsh. Tule is pronounced "toolie." Tule are reeds that grow in wet areas in the Central Valley of California. See also "Tule Fog."
ReplyDeleteUpon double-checking myself, I see that the second paragraph on the Wikipedia page for tule says:
Tules once lined the shores of Tulare Lake, California, formerly the largest freshwater lake in the western United States, until it was drained by land speculators in the 20th century. The expression "out in the tules" is still common, deriving from the dialect of old Californian families[citation needed] and means "where no one would want to live", with a touch of irony. The phrase is comparable to "out in the boondocks".
Good find. Thanks, anon.
Delete"Once away from I-80 and out in the toolies, they spread apart..."
DeleteI live in Utah. Tooele "Too-ill-uh" It is a county and a City in the county. I-80 is the interstate that runs though the county. Out here we call it Toolie because of the dumb spelling :P Stephen King has a small thing for Utah ;) All of The Stand was filmed out here. So basically Tooele is the boonies for us.
Re: "goodfoot", I'll let James Brown have a word on that subject:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgGwI12zMJg
I never heard of "easy as knitting kitten britches" , though when my dad was tinkering around with something or doing something that was none of my business, would reply to" what are you doing?" or "what's that for?" with "Cat fur for kitten britches"
ReplyDeleteMy dad would respond to "What for? [what fur?]" with "Cat fur! To make kitten britches!"
DeleteI'll echo the "out in the tules" being equivalent for meaning "out in the boondocks" -- I grew up in California so it was a fairly common expression.
ReplyDeleteAnd the yea -- I suspect the author was writing as if the person was saying "yay".. I've also heard "yay" being used as a size description -- as in "it was yay long..." (Yay being an indeterminate amount, with some notion of the size being indicated by hand or body motion). The only difference was that it was "yay" not "yea" (which here is pronunced closer to "yeah") Possibly that's a local dialect difference between California's western drawl and Minnesota's .
Right - but have you ever heard yea/yay applied to something not measured in length? (It was yay hot yesterday? I ate yay pie last night?)
DeleteIn general size or generalized dimension, yes. As in it was "yay" big, or it was "yay" hot today, or we had "yay" fun.
Deleteo.k. - that's good.
DeleteOh, I would have thought that "yea" was being used like "yer", "yor", and "ya", to mean "your", as in, possessive: "....burn your film". Does the book have other dialect scripts to support my theory?
Delete"Yea/yay big/long/whatever" is definitely common in North England (def. Lancashire; poss. Yorkshire) - doesn't mean "your", is just indefinite.
DeleteI think most of these are less colloquialisms, and more an attempt to type out the way the word sounds when spoken with a particular New England accent.
ReplyDeleteYea is actually "your"; blick is "blech"; etc.
i have spent a lot of time in rural maine. i have never heard such things.
ReplyDelete"Toolies" is used around here (very rural Western NY state). It appears to be a shortening of the phrase "Tooling out to the boonies". Tooling is driving - sometimes aimlessly - "tooling around". I've watched it change (and I love words/language) so I have been paying attention.
ReplyDeleteI was searching around for some phrases common to my area online and was surprised to land on a website with Maine colloquialisms - about half of the expressions listed as peculiar to that part of Maine are (or were) very common here. "Dooryard" was the word that got me there as I recall - people often ask me what I mean when I say it- but then I also get funny looks when I say porridge.....
ReplyDeleteThe Double Tongued Dictionary entry for "tulies".
ReplyDelete"Easy as knitting kitten britches", or sometimes "kitten pants", is a phrase I heard often growing up in rural central Florida. My grandmother used to say it. I suppose it was "easy to do" because kittens are so small..... or perhaps because kittens don't need britches, so the doing of it is utterly zero.
ReplyDeleteShe also used to say what another commenter already mentioned, "Cat fur, to make little kitten britches", whenever I asked what something was "for." It was her way of correcting me for ending a sentence with a preposition, I think.
My grandmother - from Mahanoy City, PA - used "out in the toolies"
ReplyDeleteI believe "toolies" is a phonetic way spelling "Thule". see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule
ReplyDelete