collection of hay, a word more commonly applied to the 

 rectangular hay stacks of the upper Chesapeake Bay and 

 inland parts of Virginia. 



In any case, we found a process of innovation and 

 replacement rather than loss. This leads not to a dis- 

 appearance of the traditional folk vocabulary but to a 

 phenomenon perhaps better called urban fragmentation. 

 Urban fragmentation can be observed for many different 

 kinds of farm terms. For example, the traditional 

 Northern-North Midland distinction between stone wall 

 (New England) and stone fence (Pennsylvania) for a 

 fence built of loose stones gets fragmented in Chicago 

 use to include cobble fence, cobblestone fence, brick wall, 

 barrier, drywall fence, rock fence, rock abutment, and rub' 

 ble. A shelter for hogs and pigs in Chicago usage is 

 known not only with the traditional eastern New Eng- 

 land terms sty and pig sty but also by terms imported from 

 elsewhere and still others apparently invented on the 

 spot, like pig pen, hog shed, hog bam, pig barn, barn pen, 

 hogpen, and even hog stable, which is perhaps a caique, or 

 loan translation, from German Schweinestall. 



Though we found no convincing proof, our study 

 group speculated that pig sty is relatively stable in Chi- 

 cago because it has become an element of urban folk 

 culture and vocabulary. Several participants, for exam- 

 ple, found that pig sty appears as a term of reproach — 

 "Your room looks like a pig sty!" — by urban mothers who 

 had never seen a live pig, much less a sty. 



Words like these helped us identify at least three 

 ways in which urbanization affects the farm vocabulary: 

 innovation, as in hay pile; lexical importation, as in rick 

 or shock; and semantic shift or transference, as in bale or 

 sty. All of these processes produce the types of urban 

 fragmentation we often observed and prevent the 

 obsolescence of rural terms that naive observers might 

 expect. This does not mean that rural words never dis- 

 appear. For example, when asked how to call a cow, most 

 Chicagoans simply don't know. And those who think 

 they do know tend to come up with probably ineffective 

 tries like "hey, cow!" 



Technological Change 



Technological change, on the other hand, with or with- 

 out urbanization, effectively makes words obsolete. 

 Dashboard, for example, is a word that has survived but 

 with completely changed meaning due to technological 

 change. And during the course, Mrs. McDavid observed 

 that Henry Ford probably had more to do with breaking 

 down dialect barriers than any other single individual in 

 American history. Mass-produced cars of course pro- 

 moted transportation across dialect barriers. But even 



more importantly, the language of horse-drawn machin- 

 ery and transportation is no longer the reliable index of 

 dialect differences that it was as recently as two genera- 

 tions ago. 



When asked what they would call a crossbar on a 

 wagon for an individual draft animal — an everyday, in- 

 deed indispensable feature of urban life in 1904 — only 

 eight of about one hundred people ventured any re- 

 sponse at all, and several of these responses were nonce 

 formations; that is, words that occurred only once and 

 were apparently invented on the spot. But the whipple- 

 tree or whiffletree was such a common object in the horse- 

 drawn days of living memory that Einar Haugen, a 

 famous scholar of bilingualism, observed the word used 

 in common interlingual jokes in daily newspapers as 

 recently as World War II. Similarly, however, the paral- 

 lel harness poles on a buggy, called shafts, fills, or thills in 

 older usage, are virtually without a name in current Chi- 

 cago speech. The thick sour milk that used to be called 

 clabber has all but disappeared due to changes in milk- 

 processing. These instances of lexical obsolescence, 

 sometimes sudden lexical obsolescence, are all due to 

 technological change, not urbanization as such. 



Trade 



Sociologist-economist Max Weber's famous dictum that 

 "the city is a market" also applies to urban vocabulary. 

 The classic example in the Midwest is the word for 

 cheese made with curds from sour milk, discussed in de- 

 tail by the editor of the Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Mid- 

 west, Professor Harold B. Allen. In Chicago, Lee Pederson 

 found several words borrowed from other languages, 

 such as German Schmierkdse, Czech smetlak, and even a 

 Swiss-German dialectal form Bibelikdse. But in our pilot 

 study, we found that 98 percent of those we interviewed 

 used cottage cheese, a word that began its life in American 

 English as a Northern dialectical form but has become 

 "standard" in cities. This happened partly because tech- 

 nological change has rendered obsolete the need to 

 make cottage cheese in the home. But why has cottage 

 cheese become the dominant term rather than the 

 equally plausible and historic British term curds? Why 

 don't we use other Americanisms such as Dutch cheese, 

 pot cheese, or even smearcase? The answer seems to be 

 that the large dairy firms responsible for packaging, dis- 

 tributing, and marketing the product happened to adopt 

 this particular variant. Cottage cheese is thus a trade 

 word, like xerox when used as a verb meaning "copy." 



A similar process has influenced the adoption of 

 northern kerosene over midland and southern coal oil. 7 



