A friend recently sent me a link to this story on 50 words that might be in danger of disappearing, according to a recent campaign being conducted by the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). Since the Linguistic Atlas Projects (LAP) and DARE share some of the same interests and concerns, I thought it might be productive to run the list on the interviews collected for the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR), particularly since the interviews for this collection were conducted as early as 1988 and the informants were primarily elderly people (with several being in their 90s at the time of interviews). And, of course, because collecting words reflecting earlier periods in American history was part of the aims of LAP.

While less than a smashing success, the exercise did find evidence of the use of 2 of the 50 words/phrases on the list: tow sack(s) and whistle pig(s). In the case of the former, an informant's spouse in Buena Vista, Colorado, offered the term as a synonym for gunnysack in 1990, as did an informant in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, in 2001, although he referred to it as an older term. Informants in the Colorado towns of Walden, Buelah, and Springfield also acknowledged the term when asked about it explicitly by fieldworkers. Whistle pig(s) was offered in questioning about local animals a total of five times, by informants in Buena Vista, Jefferson, Lake City, and Walden, Colorado, as well as Douglas, Wyoming. In these cases, it was referred to as being synonymous with a (high mountain) marmot.

Although able to provide information on only a couple terms from the DARE list, LAMR has plenty to offer people interested in unique and unusual words used in the Rocky Mountains and in the greater United States. My earlier posts, for instance, have presented lexical variation in LAMR in relation to aspen, dogs of mixed breed, dragonflies, flat-topped hills, horses, moonshine, orphan lambs, outhouses, and Rocky Mountain oysters, as well as expressions like "hotter than Billy blue blazes", and each of these posts has featured words and phrases that could be considered as being marginal at best. Future posts will also be presenting these words as they appear in other semantic domains of interest.