Hamlet's Dying Lingo / Boonville's homegrown jargon appears headed for history

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2001-02-05 04:00:00 PDT Boonville, Mendocino County -- For more than a century, this town has harbored an apparent jabberwocky all its own -- actually about 1,300 unique words and phrases comprising a lingo the locals call Boontling.

It can render even a nursery rhyme like "Old Mother Hubbard" incomprehensible:

The old dame piked for the chigrel nook for gorms for her bahl belljeemer

The gorms had shied, the nook was strung, and the bahl belljeemer had neemer.

Modern linguists regard Boontling as one of the most extraordinary examples of homemade language in history. Indeed, Boonville boasts slightly more Boontling terms than actual residents.

But anyone desiring to hear real Boonters harp a wee slib of the lingo had better act fast.

Boontling is on the brink of pikin' to the dusties, meaning it is about to be swept, like Latin, into the dustbin of dead languages. All of the originators are in the cemetery. Only a handful of second-wave Boonters can still be heard harpin' deep Boont with much bahlness -- speaking it fluently --

and many of them are wary of doing so in the presence of outsiders.

"My mother used to say never trust anybody until you've known them at least 20 years . . . and even then be damned careful!" says quick-witted Bobby Glover, a 79-year-old antique fruit jar collector and

volunteer fireman who serves as a veritable goodwill ambassador for Boontling.

Snapping his trademark rainbow suspenders, he has, over the decades, demonstrated Boontling and decoded it for Johnny Carson, Time magazine and the

BBC.

"All us Boonters have our own Boontling names," explains Glover, whose nom de Boontling is Chipmunk. "There's Don Pardini -- we call him 'Ite' because he's Italian. And then there's ol' 'Deek,' who otherwise goes by the name of Wes Smoot. He got his name because he was shy and always just staring at everybody -- the Boontling word for looking is deekin'. And another fellow who had a leathery old face like a relief map -- he's 'Dry Hide.' "

WHAT'S IN A NAME

As for Chipmunk himself, Bobby Glover earned his moniker by hoarding: "He takes the shavings of his pencil and saves 'em," says Smoot.

Peruse the Glover place and you'll find a Model T, a 1951 International truck, an 1870 bathtub, a slew of rocking chairs and hundreds of rare fruit jars.

"You earn a Boontling name, and then you gotta live up to it the rest of your life," Glover says with a shrug.

The surviving Boonters have tried without much success to interest local youngsters in learning their peculiar lingo. The very features that made Boonville an incubator for homemade language -- its isolation and its intimacy -- have gone the way of the horse-and-buggy.

Today, visitors who traverse the hairpin highway into Anderson Valley -- a geological gash across the Mendocino Plateau -- wind up in a hodgepodge hamlet of sheep ranches, farms and wineries, with a microbrewery and a smattering of bed and breakfasts.

They may still encounter a few fragments of Boontling, lingering mostly to hook tourists. The pay phone booth is labeled Buckey Walter, a synthesis of buckey (nickel) and Walter, the name of the first person in the valley to possess a telephone. And a diner is the Horn of Zeese, Boontling for cup of coffee, after Z.C., a Boonter hunter renowned for brewing coffee strong enough to float an egg.

But an authentic harpin' tidrick, or Boontling gabfest, is rare.

"A few of us try to keep our skills sharp on the teleef (telephone). We're adding new words now that the old-timers are gone. They fought it tooth and nail -- they wanted the lingo to die with them," Glover says with a shake of his head as he gazes out his living room picture window.

"Anyhow, it'll never be dead because of the book."

IT'S ALL IN THE BOOK

"The book" is a history and dictionary of Boontling compiled by linguist Charles C. Adams, English professor emeritus at California State University at Chico. When he rolled into the Anderson Valley in the 1960s to research Boontling, the locals cocked suspicious eyes at this gray-matter kimmie -- Boontling for professor.

Chances were he was just another bright-lighter in for a sharkin' (a city dude they could have fun flabbergasting with Boontling).

"Their lingo was an extraordinary historical treasure, but I knew that in order to unearth it, I had to earn their trust," Adams recalls. "They take you in by degrees. Boonters are protective of the language because it is intensely personal. Many of the words were derived from and intertwined with the names of their friends and neighbors, and they weren't always flattering."

For example, the Boontling words for "tattletale," "burp" and "drunk" spring from the well-known names of local residents. And a feud is a haines- crispin, after two fellows named Haines and Crispin who fought to the death over a fence line.

To publicly document Boontling would expose the hush-hush habits and follied foibles of the very people who brought the lingo to life.

But gradually Boonters warmed to Adams' notion of preserving their lingo for posterity. By the time he produced a doctoral dissertation and a book, Boonters not only declared Adams was all for poison oak, meaning an OK guy, they even awarded him a nickname of his own: B.J., after an earlier Boonville resident also named Adams.

Adams concluded that Boontling was "a deliberately contrived jargon" spoken routinely between 1880 and 1920 in the upper Anderson Valley. The name of the language is a hybrid combining "Boont," a clipped version of Boonville, and "ling" -- short for lingo.

SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE

Linguists say it's unclear whether adults created the code to speak about delicate matters in front of their offspring, or if it was the youngsters who gave birth to Boontling to communicate in front of their clueless elders.

Glover and other Boonters trace its origins to the hops field, where women first used it to gossip about an unmarried Ukiah girl banished there so her pregnancy would not besmirch the family name.

In any case, Boontling began to develop around the turn of the century, following unwritten but subliminally understood rules of word formation and syntax. It was drawn from clipped English words and Scottish and Irish influences, plus a smidgen of Pomo Indian and Spanish.

Boonville in those days was socially remote, its premium entertainments being dancing, drinking and deer hunting. The saying was you couldn't do anything in Boonville at sunup without the whole town knowing about it by noon.

"People responded by developing a sort of stage presence. They knew that anything they said or did could be incorporated into a widely told tale," Adams explains.

"Any allusion in Boontling to a name or an incident would produce instantaneous, rich cognition" -- like the yarn about the wife who spiked her alcoholic husband's jug with explosively cathartic croton oil, he says.

So Boontling became the verbal equivalent of a secret handshake: It was used to trade hunting secrets in a crowded deer camp, or call signals at a baseball game against abaloneyites from the coast.

Nowhere is that conspiratorial cling more evident than when Boonters start nonch harpin', invoking any of 15 percent of Boontling words for taboo topics. Chipmunk remembers the night in 1970 when Carson asked him on national TV about going to Boonville to burlap a bahl dame -- Boontling for making whoopee with a good-looking woman, inspired by the general store clerk and his girlfriend caught in the act on burlap sacks.

"I told him I imagined everybody up in Boonville was rolling on the floor hearing that," Glover says. "And Johnny said, 'Yes, sometimes burlappin's better rolling on the floor isn't it?' "

These days, Boonters joke about encroaching codgyhood (old age) and do what they can to teach the next generation. Glover shares a Boontling version of classics such as " 'Twas the Night Before Christmas," and his wife, Ava, has taught a bit of Boontling to her grandson in Silicon Valley. He in turn taught it to his colleagues at Yahoo.com.

A few choice words and phrases may attain immortality, especially the dirty ones.

But as a means of everyday communication, Boontling in the year 2001 is "virtually obsolete," Adams says. "It really was a creature of a unique time and place."

But perhaps someday someone will extract the time capsule buried in Boonville. It contains this ode penned by Pardini:

We've all piked for dusties now, our harpin' days are gone. But we'll never be teebow, if Boont is pikin' on.

Which translates: We've all gone to the cemetery now, our speaking days are gone. But we'll never be deaf, if Boontling is carried on.

Tracing The Origins Of Boontling

Imitating Real-Life Sounds The jargon's creators displayed keen ears for the world around them. In Boontling, baseball is buzz chick, an imitation of the buzz of the pitched ball followed by its click into the catcher's mitt. A .22 rifle is a spat, the noise it makes when fired. To travel on horseback is to keloppity, the sounds of racing hooves. And one Boontling term for milk, charl, was derived from the timbre of a jet of milk shooting from a yanked cow udder into an empty pail.

Incorporating Figures of Speech

Many expressions in Boontling are based on analogies. A mink is a girl with expensive tastes. The words for lantern, glow worm, captured how they must have looked from a distance. And a featherleg is a person who is cocky and belligerent, like the banty rooster that has feathers down to its toes.

Using Real People's Names

In Boontling, newspaper reporters are greeleys, after legendary editor Horace Greeley, and prostitutes are madges after the regionally infamous operator of a Ukiah brothel. To mossy is to change the subject, after a local named Mossy whose conversations jumped all over the place.

Phonetic Refiguring

Boonters often reshaped sounds to create a unique vocabulary. The Boontling word for day is dee, a dime is a deem, a dearly departed is said to be deed, and Independence Day is known as the Fourth of Jeel. A haircut is a hairk.

Borrowing Bits and Pieces

Boontling is based on English but also cadges from Pomo Indian and Spanish. The Boontling word for deer, boshe, is derived from a similar Pomo word for deer. Boontlingers call a deer hunting trip a boshin' tidrick, adding on a Boontling word for a social gathering derived from tea drink. A Boontling word for sheep is breggo, from a Spanish word for a yearling lamb. And the lingo is full of words rooted in Scotch-Irish tradition, such as the word for man, kimmie.

A Sprinkling of Scripture

A few Boontling terms trace their origins to Sunday school stories, among them the word for an illegitimate child or orphan -- bulrusher -- based on baby Moses being hidden in a basket in the bulrushes.

Putting It Together: Compound Words:

A moshe is a machine, and used by itself refers to a car. But a harpin' moshe is a radio, a taishin' moshe an outhouse, and moshe gorms are car food, aka gasoline. . Source: Charles C. Adams, English professor emeritus at California State University-Chico and author of "Boontling: An American Lingo"; Chronicle research.