w Terrell wrote: > > Now I'm a newcomer to this list, and I'm surprised. I'm currently from > MN and I thought all those funny sayings like "Will you throw the > garbage" and "What are you doing then" and "Anymore, I get up at six" > were localisms.-- I was struck by this example of "Anymore, I get up at six." I was raised in Western Pa and do not remember this usage. I now live in North Carolina and have recently been reading a book "Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks". This may require a bit of background for this list: the islands off the coast of NC are called the Outer Banks. The people who live there, especially on the island of Okracoke, have a famous dialect that is sometimes described as 'Elizabethan.' This is nonsense of course but what is clear is that it is very different from the speech of the adjacent areas of the lowland South. 'Hoi Toide' is an (exaggerated) phonetic spelling of the way they say 'High Tide.' The area has been until recently more or less linguistically isolated for a long time. (And still is physically, one can only get there by ferry). Anyway, the authors, linguists who have studied the matter, have traced most of the island dialect to certain parts of England, but in making the point that it also includes many elements from elsewhere, make much of its use of what the authors call 'positive anymore', that is, the use of 'anymore' to mean 'nowadays,' (as in your example) and say that this usage is "shared by dialects in more northern areas, such as those in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois...although it is rare in the lowland south...it is also found in Appalachia". So I guess my point is that I don't think we can really claim this one for the Pa Dutch. It seems to me the ones we can most surely claim are of two main kinds: those traceable to Germanic word roots, and those that are phrases translated word-for-word and preserving the German word order, which seems 'backwards' to the English ear. Enough. jan <janiceaf@ix.netcom.com> Interested in names: FRANK, KELLER, PENROSE, SCHULTZ