It’s almost complete, after 45 years, it’s almost there. A dozen surviving researchers are wrapping things up, puting the final touches on “Slab-Z, ” the fifth and final volume of a series first published in 1975 by Harvard University Press is scheduled to be completed next year.

DARE, “The Dictionary of American Regional English,” is finally closing in on completing what has to be the coolest thing I’ve heard about in the last few years: completely documenting America’s geographically variant vocabulary. All of it. The regional patois that communicates the great American quilt. 

I’m not even going to start to go into examples, I couldn’t even begin to do it justice, you get the gist. What’s so great about it is the documentation of variant words and phrases not found in normal dictionaries that we all, no matter where we live, use with our neighbors without thinking. And if we we’re born somewhere else other than our current domicile, oh how we all easily slip into our common threads when we return ‘home’.

Tom Wolfe calls DARE his “favorite reading.” I gotta get this (that’s right, it’s only in hard copy), but I’m not even sure where to start…

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