For Appalachians of a certain generation, the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English is not a reference work. It’s memoir.

While I grew up watching Gilligan’s Island and American Bandstand, I also heard, repeatedly, the story of how my father was made fun of when asked for his merchandise to be put in a “poke” at the army PX. And my grandparents and their friends were always using words and phrases that I thought peculiar, both in the sense of oddity and singularity. In my childhood, I thought only the folks around where I lived talked like that.