THE LANGUAGE: Sex & Foe Is Tin

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There is no doubt at all that aristocratic Charleston, S.C. is among the fairest of U.S. cities, and it is certain that it is the proudest by far. How many Americans know (as Charlestonians do) that the Union (ugly word) consists of 50 highly questionable states and one highly sovereign city? And who else can go to bed at night with the comforting assurance that the Atlantic Ocean is formed by the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers—right over yonder in Charleston Harbor? Above all, Charleston has its own language, a tongue completely beyond the comprehension of most other Americans, including many South Carolinians.

Charlestonese is not an intelligible distortion of the American language in the sense that the dialects of Boston, Brooklyn and Davenport, Iowa are. It pays the merest thank-you-ma'am to Webster's English, draws a lot of its vigor and flavor from Gullah, an African slave dialect still spoken by the white and Negro populations of the rice islands along the South Atlantic littoral, adds a touch of Huguenot French and a dash of regional accent that is as deep-rooted and mysterious as the brooding cypresses. Confronted with Charlestonese, philologists tremble.

Last week Charleston braced for the annual season of tourists (torsts), torrents of garden clubbers, northbound Florida winterers, southbound daughters of various revolutions, and an occasional English poet. The city and its outlying plantations never looked lovelier: after an unusually cold and wet winter, the azaleas and camellias preened in the soft spring sun; the alleys of live oaks, festooned in Spanish moss, led to another world. And as the torsts came—by tren and plen and cyah (there were even a few treelas in the new pyaks outside the city limits) —they could count on a reassuring new introduction to Charlestonese—and a vague understanding of what the natives were talking about: Lord Ashley Cooper's Dictionary of Charlestonese* compiled by Columnist Frank (Cheaper by the Dozen) Gilbreth and published by the Charleston News & Courier, was selling like tiny bay shrimp on the streets of Charleston last week. So popular was the dictionary that Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater was persuaded to insert it, in its entirety, into the Congressional Record.

(Significantly, Goldwater was named last fortnight as the presidential choice of South Carolina's minuscule Republican Party.) Items from the dictionary: Air—What you hear [hair] with.

Arm—I am.

Balks—A container, such as a match balks.

Bucks—Something the library is full of.

Coarse—Certainly.

Coined—Humane, e.g., "He was always coined to animals." Faints—A barricade of wood or brick.

Hell—An elevation somewhat lower than a mountain.

Hepcat—Act of giving assistance to a feline.

Hot—An internal organ which, in every red-blooded Charlestonian, beats quicker when the band strikes up Dixie.

Jell—Place of confinement.

Loin—Storying. Not telling the trut'.

Minuet—You and I have dined.

Passé—Father has spoken.

Sex—One less than seven, two less than eh-et, three less than noine, foe less than tin.

Tin Sin Stow—The foive and doyme.