Are you a dingbatter?
This word is used by local people in Ocracoke, referring to the crowds of tourists and other visitors.
It is better on Ocracoke Island to be an Ocracoker, with long-standing connections to the island, its people and its special dialect, known as the Ocracoke Brogue.
The complicated and rich story of the brogue is expanded in a new book published by UNC Press. In this follow-up to the celebrated “Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks,” N.C. State professors Jeffrey Reaser and Walt Wolfram, together with fourth generation Ocracoke resident Candy Gaskill, have written the most comprehensive linguistic look at Ocracoke yet, “Language and Life on Ocracoke: The Living History of the Brogue.”
To understand Ocracoke Island and the people who live there, it is necessary to expand your vocabulary. You have already learned some essential words: Ocracoker, dingbatter, Hoi Toid, Ocracoke Brogue.
“Hoi Toid” is special. It is the way to say “high tide” in the Ocracoke Brogue. Its use respectfully asserts that the speaker understands and appreciates the specialness of the way the islanders talk. It also gives the islanders one of their nicknames: “Hoi Toiders.”
The authors assert that this distinctiveness is just one part of the dialect’s intrigue. The rich history of pirates in the area, including the infamous Blackbeard, has led some to speculate that hoi toiders sound like the pirates of yesteryear.
Others have claimed the island, settled by Europeans in the early 17th Century, has preserved Elizabethan or Shakespearean English. Neither of these assertions is quite correct, but they do accurately capture the fact that roots of the dialect are deep, rich and fascinating.
Ocracoke’s allure is multifaceted. Because the island is accessible only by boat, it has something unusual that makes visitors, and would-be visitors feel they are going to a place that is quite different. So much so that first-time visitors treat Ocracoke as though it were a different country rather than an island off the North Carolina coast.
One of the authors, Candy Gaskill, reports that travelers on the ferry to Ocracoke often ask if American money is accepted on the island.
The authors also explain that “the island is routinely described as a quaint fishing village, which is both truth and fantasy. Commercial fishing, long a pillar of the island economy, is now practiced by just a few islanders, with the maritime past indelibly printed on the island, and the local fish house remains a prominent landmark on the harbor. An additional contributor to Ocracoke’s quaintness is that it has no chain restaurants or stores, It remains walkable and bikeable, though more recently, scooters and golf carts seem to have become the preferred mode of transportation in the village.
There is much more to Ocracoke. And for serious North Carolina historians, many lessons about our famous island.
D.G. Martin, a lawyer, retired as UNC system vice president for public affairs in 1997. He hosted PBC-NC’s “North Carolina Bookwatch,” for more than 20 years.
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