Presented with the UP Notable Book Club by the Upper Peninsula Publishers & Authors Association (UPPAA), Limpy’s Adult Lexicon: Raw, Politically Incorrect, Improper, and Unexpurgated as Overheard and Noodled is the oddball offspring of a long love affair—with a place, with its people, and with its language. I’m Joseph Heywood, and this is how Limpy Allerdyce walked out of my head and into a book, why a fake dictionary tells a truer story than you might expect, and what the UP taught me about words, listening, and life.
Love at first sight — how the UP shaped everything
I was 14 when my family pulled up the long drive to what was then Kinross Air Force Base. While my mother wept, convinced we’d landed at the end of the earth, I grinned. Thick green forest, rolling hills, clear brooks—Angels, really. That moment was an instant lifelong claim on me. I’ve lived in and loved the Upper Peninsula in many capacities since then.
The UP is tough. Winters can drop thirty-plus feet of snow across months; folks “shrink their light footprint” and survive on a few wood-heated rooms. That environment produces a people with grit—resourceful, self-reliant, neighborly without being meddlesome. The Finnish word sisu—an unyielding will to endure—serves as good shorthand for what the place demands.
How Limpy Allerdyce became real
Limpy is a fictional creation—an old violator/poacher from southwest Marquette County who has a reputation that makes strangers part the crowd when he walks down a street. But fiction is made of truths; many incidents in my Woods Cop series come from actual conservation officer experiences.
The lexicon itself grew very slowly. When I first heard the lingo in 1958, I started scribbling phrases and pronunciations—initially into Converse high-tops, later a plastic bin at home. A 15,000-word manuscript became 35,000 at my editor’s request. What began as a notebook of overheard turns of phrase became a book about how people make meaning in their place.
Why a fake dictionary matters
Calling Limpy’s Adult Lexicon a “fake dictionary” is fair. It’s more fictionary than dictionary, intentionally playful, and occasionally politically incorrect. But dictionaries are also cultural fossils—records of how people thought, worked, and loved. Language records place, climate, customs, and the small inventive choices that make a community unique.
We are storytelling creatures. Give most folks a single evocative detail and they’ll spin a narrative to explain it. The believability of stories often rests on specifics—local facts that resonate. That’s where a regional lexicon has power: precision and specificity make a dialect feel true.
Language, vocabulary, and why words matter
Some quick, useful numbers I like to trot out:
- A one-year-old’s vocabulary ≈ 50 words.
- By age three ≈ 1,000 words; by age eight ≈ 10,000 words.
- An average American adult: roughly 20,000–30,000 working words; an older adult by 60 might reach ≈ 48,000 words.
- That growth averages to about two new words per day—steady, cumulative, human.
Words shape thought. Dialect and vocabulary are not just accents—they are ways of thinking that carry history, emotion, and identity. Teaching kids to expand vocabulary is a voyage of discovery: new words mean new ways to conceive the world.
The patterns I noticed: Slurvian, up-eperisms, and creative coinage
When you listen closely you’ll find recurring patterns in UP speech:
- Pure (high) Slurvian: substitution of one English word for another—antidote for anecdote, reputation for repetition, calvary for cavalry.
- Impure (low) Slurvian: nonsense or compressed sounds stand in for full phrases—“jeet?” decodes as “Did you eat?”
- Inventive coinages: farlookers for binoculars, hard water for ice, ink pencil for pen.
These patterns show order and creativity: verbs leading nouns, clipped modifiers, and a compact economy of expression that feels both efficient and vivid.
Examples you’ll hear in Limpy’s world
Here are sample entries and turns of phrase you’ll meet in the lexicon—some playful, some practical:
- Jeet? → Did you eat?
- Farlookers → Binoculars
- Hard water → Ice
- Ink pencil → Pen
- Looking a little stinky → Smelling a little stale (a store cooler example)
And the blunt bits of Allerdyce wisdom—part menace, part homespun counsel—are worth remembering:
If there’s a lot, take a lot. If there ain’t much, take it all.
Put one foot down then other foot and like that.
Pronunciation, place names, and the fading twang
Pronunciation is a whole separate map of the UP. Place names and local pronunciations often surprise outsiders:
- Toivola (not Toybola)
- Amnicon/Amnicon? (often misread on maps)
- Keweenaw locales pronounced in arcane local ways—Gogebic, Bessemer, Theiler (Taylor Road local spelling/pronunciation quirks)
- “A” and vowel shifts: some speakers use long “a” or “e” sounds in ways that differ from neighboring regions.
When I first came in the late 1950s the yooper twang was more ubiquitous. Now it survives in smaller pockets. Mass media and national schooling homogenize speech, and the old twang slips away. That’s another reason to record it: dialect is a repository of local history and identity.
On the road with conservation officers — the research that grounded the books
For more than two decades I rode with Michigan conservation officers—up to a month a year—across every county in the UP and many counties below the bridge. Those ride-alongs taught me two things:
- Conservation officers are exceptional listeners. In encounters that could be tense, they often listen patiently, discriminate truth from bluff, and work toward reasonable solutions.
- Their lives are complicated, courageous, and sometimes heartbreaking. The officers’ experiences supplied most of the real-world detail for the Woods Cop mysteries and for Limpy himself.
The officers have their own moral code. A game warden will often distinguish between someone in real need and someone far less deserving—and act accordingly. That humane, practical judgment is a core through-line in the stories.
Publishing, a UP Notable book, and my contrarian ego
When Limpy’s Lexicon was named a UP Notable Book I had to laugh at myself. Forty years into writing I had held a somewhat jaundiced view of awards. At 82, however, I’ve softened. Writers tend to favor the book they’re working on—published books become the past; the current project is the present. That said, a fake dictionary getting a Notable nod felt about as absurd as you’d expect—and my late dad would have called them “out of their minds.” Yet the recognition nudged me to appreciate small honors and the odd paths ideas take.
What I hope readers take away
Limpy’s Adult Lexicon is a tribute. It honors the UP’s language, its people, and that brittle balance between law and necessity in rural lives. It’s meant to make people laugh, wince, and think about how dialects encode experience. Above all, it’s a reminder that language carries place—and that place, in turn, shapes language.
If you want a doorway into the Woods Cop mysteries, Limpy is both a warning and an invitation. Read him for the language, stay for the people, and let the UP’s winters and lakes and oddball humor get under your skin the way they got under mine.
Where to find more
Limpy’s Adult Lexicon and the Woods Cop series arise from long years of listening, riding, and paying attention to the UP. For more about the UP Notable Book Club and the Upper Peninsula Publishers & Authors Association, visit UPPAA online. And if you’re curious about the stories that fed these pages, start with Ice Hunter and Blue Wolf in Green Fire for the Woods Cop mysteries.
Thank you for reading. If you ever find yourself in the UP, take the time to listen: local speech is shorthand for a whole way of living.