Wicked Good Guide to Boston English

We go back to 1908, right off the boat into Boston...I moved to California for college and was shopping at the Coop, I told the checkah' about getting padadahs and cohn form the cella etc. she called over to the the supervisor and said she needed someone to interpret for her she had a foreigner from someplace in Europe or Canada! I laughed until I almost peed my pants...she was dead serious, later I explained and she stil had a tin ear for the most colorful dialect of English outside of Aberdeen Scotland...

I grew up in a small town about 25 miles from Boston,495, Route 1 and 2 go straight through it and Route 3 is about 10 minutes away, I worked as a waitress in my teen years. Many people from Boston came through, I got used to Boston slang growing up as well as working, but I have learned a true New Engander will always say jimmies and/or get irritated when people say sprinkles.

A friend of mine (not from Boston) was teaching her Dorchester middle schoolers about words we use in English that derive from native American words. After defining a number of words, she wrote "toboggan" on the board and said "does anyone know what toboggan means?" A boy raised his hand and said, "sure, it's when you're buying something and you argue to get the price down."

Thank you for your works regarding our peculiar ways of speaking. I love reading about observations of the Boston accent and it's variations. I wear mine proudly.

Some others are.....

POCK•A•BOOK is a woman's pocketbook.

PITCHA- it can be anything from the guy on the mound at Fenway or a movie (motion picture) as in "Did you see the Depahted? That was a swell Pitcha" to something you put lemonade in (a pitcher.

ORAN•JADE or orangeade is orange soda (which is tonic.) Funny thing is when in Washington DC one time I asked for tonic and they thought I meant some kind of medicine or hair tonic.

And other places we add R's where they shouldn't be are Lisa= leeser, pasta is pahster, and idea is idear.

We "werk" at our jobs.

And you don't have a heart attack, you take one. As in Sully took a haht attack at his job on the T.
Of course then he got bettah so we had a time for him when he retired (re•tie•yed)

and if you get a job with the state you "got on the state" or with the MBTA you "got on the T"

We eat "pah•day•duhs" mashed or boiled.

We drink Boddled Wodda now since bubbelahs are rare.

Filene's was pronounced Fill•eans

We shopped at the Quinzee bahgin centah.

And Quincy was Quinzee and Worcester was Wista but Medford was not Meffa unless you lived on the north shore.

And if you were a narcissist you were "con•seeded".

And typing this on an iPhone with auto correct on has been quite a chore.

Thanks,

From a Dot Rat now living on the northern part of the Irish Riviera (Nantasket Beach)

Others I remember from Dorchester were.....

You i•yun your pants when they are wrinkled.
An almond was an armand
A hoss race was something you bet on.
The Red Line was called The Rattler.
The nuns called the bathroom the lavratory which we thought was laboratory.
We had a swill bucket in the ground next to the back porch.

Fei-ah...what my mother, from Dorchester, used to call a fire.

getcha sweatah. Weer gonnah go down the baah and havah couplah Perl Hahbahs."

I travel a lot for work and of necessity attempt to moderate some of the most audible aspects of my local accent. A couplah pops, though, and it all comes back.

There are worse accents, though. On a street in London, I was once asked for directions by a young man whom I eventually learned was from Perth, Scotland. I had to ask him to repeat himself, twice, before saying, "One more time, please, and slowly. I'm sorry. I know you're speaking English, but I don't have a clue what you're saying."

Place names are a problem for those of us not raised here as well. As above, it's "Situit" which is pretty close to the original Massasoit pronunciation of "Satuit." And it's not "Nep-on-set" as he thought it sounded the first time a friend from Texas saw it written on an offramp sign on the Expressway. Nor "Wistah" or "Lemmonstah."

No one, though, comes close to Mefford resident Kim whose rant against, among things, Tufts students, Tevas, recycling, and "intalopahs" - which so help me God I first thought must have been small animals - brings me to tears of joy:

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2014/09/10...

I get that Bostonians drop final r's, but how do you pronounce middle ones, as in "parrot."

(I actually need this for a play, and this word trips me up every time ...)

Thanks!

I am an associate professor of historical linguistics in Japan but was born in England.

I am researching special words for “yes” and “no” in Boston. Colonists from the East of England, where I grew up, may have brought "jess" and "dow" to New England in the seventeenth century. Four hundred years later, these special words still survive.

In the East of England, we still use dow and jearse today. However, these words for “no” and “yes” are not recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary or the Survey of English Dialects. Nor were they recorded by the Linguistic Atlas of New England; but the Dictionary of American Regional English cites daow, daowd, dow, doh or day-oh in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island as well as New York State. There is also daow in New Hampshire. For “jearse or jess,” informants in my survey cited jass in Upstate New York and possibly Vermont, jearse in New Hampshire, jyes or djess in Maine and Massachusetts.

A couple of people have told me of a possible "jess" in Boston. So I'd like to ask your readers: do you say "jess" for "yes" or "dow" for "no" in Boston?

I have more information about my research plus a survey that readers can complete online at http://yesandno.info/

As a kid growing up in Arlington we used to play "bombardment" all the time, it was only when I got older and moved out of town that I learned that the rest of the world refers to the game as dodgeball.