The word is out: I was a teenage astamagootis

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/22/word-dictionary-american-regional-english

Version 0 of 1.

I was sorry to hear that the Dictionary of American Regional English (Dare) was experiencing a funding crisis. Sorry, and also a little surprised to find that it had even survived this long. Its important work – to preserve, record, define and map American dialects over a vast continent and across shifting populations – is so slow and painstaking that the dictionary only drops into the wider public consciousness every decade or so. Unless funding is found soon, the project may end for good in June.

Related: Cash crisis threatens dictionary of US regional English

Dare has its roots in the founding of the American Dialect Society in 1889, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that the exhaustive fieldwork necessary to create an actual dictionary was undertaken. Teams were sent across the country armed with a questionnaire aimed at finding out, among other things, whether locals called a frying pan a skillet or a spider. Editing started in the mid-1970s. For my birthday my mother bought me the first volume – A to C – when it came out in 1985, and I pored over it.

By the time the second volume was published, in 1991, I’d already moved from Connecticut to London. Consequently, my expertise in American regional English begins at A and stops at C. In fact, the only word from the dictionary that has stayed with me all these years is “astamagootis”, a regional alternative – uncommon but found in both Michigan and Iowa – for “worrywart”. Apparently it’s a loose transliteration of the Dutch phrase Als het maar goed is, meaning “as long as everything is all right”. But they don’t use the nervous exhortation to personify anxious people in the Netherlands – that’s an American innovation.

For a brief period I tried to adopt “astamagootis” as part of my vocabulary (the dictionary, as I recall, offered a single citation from Connecticut, which made me think I could own the word). I gave up after a while because no one ever understood what I was calling them; and when I explained what it meant, people would invariably point out that I was the biggest astamagootis in the room.

The fifth and final volume of Dare came out in 2012, but there is more work to be done: regional dialects mutate constantly, and a national resurvey had been planned. A crowdfunding appeal has been set up on GoFundMe to help save Dare, but it is unlikely to cover the project’s annual $525,000 budget. In the meantime I’m just wringing my hands and hoping everything will be all right. As usual.

Middle age moves farther into the future with each passing year. At this rate I may not live to see it

The real midlife crisis

When I was in my twenties I certainly considered 40-year-old people to be middle aged,, and people as young as 35 were sometimes included in the definition. By the time I got to 40, the American Psychiatric Association had updated its entry-level age for the distinction from 40 to 45. In 2013, the year I turned 50, researchers found that middle age began at 53. This week, a month before my 52nd birthday, a study published in the journal PLOS One suggests that middle age now begins at 60.

It’s been a while since anyone used the term midlife in its literal sense of “halfway through”, and of course all these studies are simply measuring our perceptions of what old is. I’ve been describing myself as middle-aged since I was 45 – and no one’s ever objected – but by today’s standards I still haven’t reached that milestone. That giant midlife crisis I had a while back was, it turns out, just me being an astamagootis.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m only happy to find myself riding in the wake of this particular trend. I’m ageing as steadily as ever, and yet middle age moves farther into the future with each passing year. At this rate I may not live to see it.

@RealTimDowling