Today's post revisits data collected in the states of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming for a Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR) by looking specifically at a lexical variant often discussed among scholars of American regional dialects: dragonfly. In the Atlas work conducted in the eastern United States in the first half of the 20th century, Kurath (1949) found dragonfly for an insect with long wings that hovered around swampy areas to be the primary variant used by educated speakers. However, he also found a great number of regional folk variants for this creature, including (devil's) darning needle in New England and the Dutch settlements of the North, snake feeder in the Midland region, and darning needle and snake doctor in competition in West Virginia. Snake doctor was also the predominant form in the piedmont of Virginia and North Carolina, while mosquito hawk was a common variant in coastal Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

The figure below shows the distribution of variants for this entity in LAMR.

As is the case for other lexical variants in the survey, dragonfly variants have a complex distribution in the collection. Clearly, dragonfly (in both its singular and plural forms) is the top-ranking variants among LAMR informants; however, several of the Eastern regional expressions noted by Kurath also make their appearance in the corpus, namely, (devil's) darning needle(s), snake feeder(s), and snake doctors. And while the hapax legomena, or oncers, include several names for animals that might reveal a mismatch between question and answer, one informant provided a label for the insect that occurs rarely in the dialectological literature: airplane. Further research will be conducted to determine if this is simply the lexical choice of an individual, or if others use it, and whether any of the low-frequency items for this item pattern in socially significant ways in the Middle Rockies.

For more on dragonfly variants, see the entry for the item in the Dictionary of American Regional English and Rodgers (2013).

For a word search on this topic, click here.

Kurath, Hans. (1949). A Word Geography of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Rodgers, Carley. (2013). "Snake doctors, darning needles, dragonflies, oh my!" Southern Journal of Linguistics 37(2): 134-157.