Itâ??s axiomatic that even on the East Coast long sandwiches go by a host of names: hero (especially New York City), grinder (chiefly in New England), hoagie (mainly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey) and submarine (everywhere). For 45 years, DARE has been documenting Americaâ??s geographically variant vocabularies. Despite the conforming effects of air travel, television and the Internet, neither mobility nor media seem to be able to erase regional patois. “In speaking and writing and talking with strangers, we tend to use a more homogeneous vocabulary,” said Joan Houston Hall, who has headed DARE for the past decade. “But in daily lives, those words vary. Thereâ??s a whole panoply of words not found in normal dictionaries that we use without thinking.” These words are the stuff of DARE, which is supposed to be completed by next year. The first four volumes were published by Harvard University Press, in alphabetical order beginning in 1975. Now, a dozen surviving DARE researchers and editors working in a library building on the University of Wisconsin, Madison, campus are putting the finishing touches on the final volume, “Slab-Z.”
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