A few days ago I said I am reading Cold Mountain. I mentioned in
the same blog post that late last year and early this year I also read Team of Rivals and Gone With the Wind,
so I have a basic understanding of the Civil War, which makes Cold Mountain all
the more enjoyable.
One of the things that impresses me is author Charles Frazier’s ability to go back to that period and research the way people spoke. The story takes place largely in the western Appalachian mountains of Tennessee. As I recall, there is a distinct pattern of speech and words used in the more remote areas even now. This is to say nothing of how people spoke 135 years earlier in the last year of the Civil War, which is when the action takes place
Some examples:
- He was just a little withy man. I was able to figure out the meaning easy enough, but I’d never heard the word withy.
- The revision in him had come unexpected, he said. This one means an event that made a character change his ways. Again, a unique use of the language.
- By now there’s not enough greats to say how far these goats are distant from the first batch. A character admitting that she has lost track of how many generations of goats have been produced by the original heard of eight goats.
The best one I have come across, though, was a reference to coming out after a storm and seeing a “Jacob’s ladder.” I thought about it for a minute and concluded that he was referring to the rays of sun you see from a break in the clouds after it rains. I looked it up in Wikipedia and the term comes from Genesis 28:10-19, in which Jacob sees a stairway from heaven. As near as I can tell from research on the internet, this is exactly what it refers to.
I would imagine that Frazier read any number of letters from that period to learn the patois. There might even be a few Civil War re-enactment groups that offer some expertise on the language from that time.
In all, a good job of research on any already good novel.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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