In the South, she explains, areas have long been settled, and sometimes lacked good schools. Ms. Hall and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, are about halfway through the dictionary. They work at a snail's pace, combing through 2.5 million words and phrases cataloged during fieldwork. Nobody is sure when the dictionary will be finished. Volume I took 15 years and has some 12,000 expressions.
Every word is an audible dessert, dripping with the sauce of regionalism.
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