Boontling “Deek”: A Rovin’ Gypsy Word?

The little town of Boonville (Mendocino County, California) was established in the early 1860s near a slightly older place called The Corners. A local general store was moved from The Corners to the present location of the town centre and then sold to Mr W. W. Boone, who modestly named the settlement after himself (it had briefly been called Kendall City in appreciation of another local businessman). The inhabitants of Boonville (now about 1000 people) refer to their town colloquially as Boont.

What makes Boonville special is its local ‘jargon’ which probably arose in the 1890s among children and young people (who then grew up without abandoning it). The community was quite isolated at the time, and kept no records to inform posterity why they chose to develop an extremely hermetic and highly inventive vocabulary of about 1500 words, known as Boontling (Btl.). Boontling was not originally meant to be written down, but a semi-formalised spelling was developed for it in the 1970s. One of the local words is to boont ‘to speak Boontling’. At present Boontling is dying out (Btl. pikin to the dusties) despite having been discovered by linguists and made known to the general public. Many Boontling words remain in circulation, but there are few fluent users left. Boontling has never been a fully fledged dialect: it has a distinct vocabulary incomprehensible to outsiders, but the accent is a rural variety of Northern California English (with historical affinities to the Midwestern and Border South dialects), and Boontling syntax is in nearly all respects the same as that of mainstream US English.

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Despite its recent origin, Boontling vocabulary is etymologically opaque to a surprising extent. Nevertheless, the vast majority of its words are coined from pre-existing elements rather than made up entirely from scratch. Often you have to know the history of the place and rely on anecdotes collected from elderly locals that “explain” the meaning of some words, especially those derived from personal names. (A professional etymologist has to verify their historicity, of course, and this is likely to be the toughest part of the job.) Some words reflect otherwise forgotten dialectal or slangy vocabulary. Some were coined using Humpty Dumpty’s technique of piecing together broken fragments of ordinary English words. Some hide behind strange pronunciations that appear to have been borrowed from Scottish or Ulster Scots speakers. Some came from Spanish (approximately half the population is of “Hispanic or Latino” descent), and a few from the Pomoan languages indigenous to California (there are a few Native Americans as well).

I’m intrigued by a few of them. For example, one of the most common and persistent Boontling words is deek ‘look, see, stare, notice’ (also used as a deverbal noun). I’m not aware of the use of deek anywhere else in North America. However, deek is a well-known colloquial Northernism in Britain. It’s stereotypically associated with Geordie (the dialect of Newcastle and the Tyneside area), but it actually occurs throughout Northern England (including Cumbria, Liverpool and Yorkshire) and much of Scotland. The word is a loan from Romani or rather Angloromani – the Romani-derived lexicon embedded in the varieties of English used by the British Romanies (see Yaron Matras, 2010, Romani in Britain: The Afterlife of a Language, Edinburgh University Press). The Angloromani verb (no longer inflected) is deek, dik, dikkai [diːk, dɪk, dɪkʰaɪ], reflecting European Romani dikh- ‘see’. There are, by the way, quite a few Romani loans in British dialects (some of them, such as pal ‘brother, friend’, no longer dialectal). The Dictionary of the Scots Language gives, among others, these recent examples of the use of deek:

• Deek that gadgie. ‘Look at that guy.’ (Edinburgh, 1988)
• The gaffer wis anither big rough-deeking gadgie... (Aberdeen, 1990)

Here, in addition to deek, also gadgie ‘guy, bloke’ is a Romani loan (Angloromani gadji, gawdjo, gawdja < European Romani gadžo ‘non-Gypsy’).

The root dikh- arrived with the ancestors of the modern Romani all the way from Northwestern India. It is cognate to Hindi dekh- and to Sanskrit dṛś-, dṛkṣ-, all of which continue a well-known Proto-Indo-European root, *derḱ- ‘watch, see’. Incidentally, the Hindi word became independently borrowed into British English via the army slang of British soldiers serving in India, hence have a dekko ‘have a look’.

The Germanic languages also inherited a few words derived from *derḱ-, but English has lost all of them. Old English still had torht ‘bright, splendid, illustrious’ from the PIE deverbal adjective *dr̥ḱ-tó- (cf. Skt. dṛṣṭá- ‘seen, visible’). It was used almost exclusively in poetry, but also served as an element forming personal names. For example, an Old English gadgie called Torhthelm (Totta for friends) owned a farm called Totta’s Homestead (Tottan-hām) in today’s north London. The To- part of Tottenham is about all that has survived of the root *derḱ- in Modern English via direct descent. A number of other reflexes, however, have reached English by horizontal transfer from other Indo-European languages, the most spectacular of them being dragon (ultimately from Greek drákōn ‘starer’ → ‘serpent with a deadly stare’). But I’m digressing.

I have no watertight proof that Btl. deek is the same word as Angloromani, Northern English, Scots and Scottish English deek, but I’d be very surprised if somebody proved that Btl. deek had a different origin. Still, I have no idea how the word could have reached an obscure valley in Northern California and become fixed in the local slang without leaving any other traces in American English. If anyone among my readers comes up with an idea how to explain its trajectory in time and space, I’ll be immensely grateful for sharing it.