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JFK at the Union
Legend has it that John F. Kennedy first proposed the Peace Corps at U-M. The truth is more complex, and a lot more interesting.
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TALKING ABOUT WORDS »
Us and them
Are you a fudgie? A chicken - necker? Maybe a dingbatter? It all depends on where you go — and who you aren't.
TALKING ABOUT MOVIES »
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The stinky slime of algae can make any lake unbearable. U-M prof John Lehman is developing new ways to do something about it.
Us and them
January 15, 2008
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| Are you a snowbird? |
Now that winter has arrived, Florida and other warm-weather spots welcome snowbirds from the north who flee south from the weather. Like the migration of geese, the change of seasons and the direction of travel of motor homes, with appended automobiles, follow the angle of the sunshine: as the angle descends, they head south; as is rises, they return. The state of Florida even has a snowbird web site illustrating someone doing so unlikely a thing as scratching behind a manatee's ears. Snowbirds—an expression that has been around at least since 1923—head south to engage warm nature as their northern neighbors hunker in darkened ice-fishing shanties while the winds howl.
Where there are strong feelings, there are words. Around the Straits of Mackinac, the summer people are often called fudgies. Mackinac Island is filled with fudge shops, and day trippers seldom depart without a box of the stuff to take back home. In my experience, being called a fudgie may be a term of endearment, but it is not necessarily a friendly one.
Talk of summer people in northern resort areas always puts me in mind of Tom Paine's scorn for summer soldiers and sunshine patriots early in our Revolution. There's no doubt that the locals feel something of the same way that Paine did about summer people since these folks aren't working; they're on vacation. Likely they are not just more leisurely, they are more demanding and richer. Someone who has struggled through the winter may have a mixture of feelings about the return of the summer people. The locals are the ants in Aesop's fable;the summer people are grasshoppers.
Many such terms flourish in North American English. In the high Sierras and the Green Mountains of Vermont, visitors may be called flatlanders. In Prince Edward Island (and elsewhere) they are said to be mainlanders from away. In Alaska, they are statesiders. Along the shores of Chesapeake Bay, tourists are often called chicken-neckers. Local people catch succulent blue crabs in crab traps; visitors dangle a raw chicken neck on a string from a pier and hope that a crab will latch onto it so it can be pulled up for dinner.
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On Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, outsiders are called dingbatters. In New Mexico, seasonal tourists are winter visitors. A term now thankfully obsolete is carpetbagger. Cities with a vigorous convention trade profit from visiting firemen (who may not be firefighters at all).
Most of these terms are not very well documented. Fudgie doesn't make it into the "Dictionary of American Regional English," and it's not in the "Historical Dictionary of American Slang" either.
One that is abundantly represented in dictionaries is milor (< "my lord") which creeps into the historical record as early as 1607. Wealthy English families often sent sons on a Grand Tour of the Continent, accompanied by tutors, in the hope that they would become cultivated. Most of them, to judge by their representation in English literature, became merely affected and debauched, and when they returned home they sprinkled their talk with foreign phrases and wore extravagant clothes.
Milor, a term for sucking up to well-dressed English tourists, seems to have spread into most European countries. In assimilated form, it occurs in German, Dutch, Norwegian, French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Greek, and even Albanian. Milady was less common but similarly widespread. Though obsolete in English and these other languages, it shows what a term for visitors can achieve.
Fudgie and Snowbird have some way to go.
All of these expressions help to distinguish insiders from outsiders, natives from foreigners, us from them. One of my favorites is English. Amish people clump all those who are not plain people by calling them English. Japanese tourists riding a bus through Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and snapping photographs of buggies are English. So is everyone reading this page, regardless of their ancestry.
Richard W. Bailey is Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. His latest publication (co-edited with Colette Moore and Marilyn Miller) is an edition of a chronicle of daily life in London written by a merchant in the middle of the sixteenth century. This electronic book incorporates images of the manuscript, a transcript of the writing it contains, and a modernization of the text for easy reading. Thanks to the University of Michigan Library and the University Press, the work is freely available to all: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/machyn/