Slop Pail

D IALECTAL BLENDING occasionally occurs in dialect areas where two synonymous regional terms compete for acceptance and a third term emerges consisting of the beginning of one variant and the ending of the other. Statistically significant dialectal blending is a rather rare occurrence, since the normal phenomenon is either the dominance of one term over the other or continued regional separation. Some of the better known examples of such blending in American English are reported by Kurath and by Atwood. The two most prominent examples in A Word Geography of the Eastern United States are free seed (free stone + clear seed) peach, which occurs only 6 times among about 120 informants in West Virginia and eastern Ohio,' and fire bug (fire fly + lightning bug), which occurs a total of 37 times and is common only the Susquehanna River to the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania; there are 159 informants in Pennsylvania.2 Similarly, the most notable examples of dialectal blending reported by Atwood are not statistically significant. His two most frequently occurring blends are mantelboard (mantel or mantelpiece +fire board) and hidy (hi + howdy); the former occurs 34 times, and the latter only 14 times among Atwood's 273 informants.3 None of these four blendings occurs either with the numerical frequency or the widespread regional distribution of the most remarkable dialectal blending in the Upper Midwest, slop pail (slop bucket + swill pail). Slop pail provides support for McDavid's statement that from the beginning of the English-speaking settlement, it is likely that dialect mixture has been the rule rather than the exception in almost any American community.'4 Clearly, dialect mixture is even more characteristic of secondary settlements west of the Atlantic seaboard than it is of the primary settlement areas. In the eastern United States there are two regional terms for the container for garbage or for the liquid food given to pigs. The Northern term is swill pail; the term found in the Midland and Southern

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• To Start a Fire

  Allison Burkette•American Speech•2017

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