As suggested by a previous post on orphan lambs (and, for that matter, a post on Rocky Mountain oysters as well), the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR) is full of information on variation in animal terms in the Rocky Mountains. In today's post, I take a look at lexical variants that informants provided for "man's best friend" in the collection, and more specifically, their responses to a prompt for the generic names of "a dog of mixed breed." Despite having only 70 informants, LAMR offers a wealth of data on variation in terms for this rather common entity.

In total, 42 informants offered at least one response to the item that wasn't suggested by the fieldworker (and thus disregarded), for a total of 53 tokens of 21* types, as shown in the figure below:

Fig. 1: Variants of "dogs of mixed breed" by number of LAMR informants (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As illustrated, mongrel(s) is the highest-ranking term in the set (with 16 tokens), followed by cur(s) (8 tokens), dog(s), and mutt(s) (5 tokens). Of these, mongrel and mutt were certainly no surprise, as those are what I would usually use (or at least hear, for dogs and, metaphorically, just about anything else of mixed breed, especially humans), and dog(s) wasn't shocking either. As for cur, I had some familiarity with the usage, but didn't expect to find this many responses of it in the set. The biggest surprise, however, was the frequency of Heinz (a term that I had not heard used in this manner before doing fieldwork), and in particular, the creative lengths that people would go to in using it in various combinations.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Responses that included the word dogs were collapsed into a single category but included some colorful turns of phrase, including "any dog you'd seen in the country," "just dogs," "ordinary dogs"

Donate