It’s funny to watch the out-of-staters (we call them ‘flatlandahs’ LOL) trying to figure out what we’re talking about. ;-)

You are so right. When I moved to Boston from Indiana and got a job which included answering the phone — for the first 10 days I had to hand the phone to someone else every time — couldn’t make out head nor tail.

After ten days I’d ‘learned the language.”
a note, tho–much as I enjoy a good tussle over language (devotee of all things language from earliest memory) — right now I’m scared —less of all this fierce talk from the crazies who we know are capable of just about anything. I have not been so nervous since the Cuban missile crisis. Anybody else?

IMO, there is a world of difference between regional usages and wilfull despoiliation of a language merely as an attention-getting ploy.

Despoliation is in the eye of the beholder. Languages change. There is resistance to such change. Both are aspects of the same process.

and kay at 81—’sohda’soda, ‘wahdda’water cape cod
i still say it that way sometimes.

people here say ‘wadder’water.

take care

one of the first questions my uncle asked me when i moved here to se ohio was about the slang and dialects here. i go back there and realize how much of it i have included in my speech.sloppy.then i come back here after a week, and i am back to proper english again.i like a mix.

the quote is funny. i have heard it before.my uncle is/was a historian.

i don’t like the flippant constant usage of slang because it’s demeaning, to the person using it-and sometimes the intention is to demean others. condescension.

if we want to get picky-even using contractions is bad form–don’t, won’t, didn’t, etc. but it’s much easier to read. i still have a hard time ending a sentence in a preposition. and i use the word ‘whom’. in the same sentence as gunna….ha…

my grandmother said ‘wardsh’ for ‘wash’. but she also said ’sofa’ not ‘couch’. and lavatory.

i was taught that using slang or cuss words meant i was choosing to not fully express my ideas and thoughts. but i think a good cuss word works just fine sometimes.
i think it depends on how someone wants to express themselves, and the reason for the expression. that would enter into which words i choose.
on a blog, a shortcut is sometimes a good thing for wordy people like me.

take care,

: )

I guess you’ll just have to read the last version of MAD magazine your staff left on your bed stand….Ooops..the dog ate that too!

WHAT A MORON..NOBODY care what this loser says….

It’s funny to watch the out-of-staters (we call them ‘flatlandahs’ LOL) trying to figure out what we’re talking about. ;-)

I spent a lot of time in Prague. Praguers speak a dialect of Czech which is often somewhat unintelligible to those not in on it. Rather like the Maine usages you describe. Additionally, literary, written Czech is much more formal than spoken Czech. Czech is a wonderful language, albeit structurally difficult for those not to the manner acclimated.

IMO, there is a world of difference between regional usages and wilfull despoiliation of a language merely as an attention-getting ploy.

I especially appreciate poets Hayden Carruth and David Budbill for their wonderful use of New Hampshire and Maine dialect.

Way back, decades ago, I was greatly amused and confused during a journey by train the length of England. Seemingly, at each station where the train stopped, the platform announcements were in a different dialect from that obtaining at journey’s origin in Sussex. And I appreciate these variations very much, lamenting their increasing passing.

What we are confronting at FDL is not some regionalisms, but a wilful despoiliation of our common discourse. The offender shows his hand in his mean-spirited diatribes yesterday, to which I refer interested parties.

i wasn’t allowed to use slang growing up..in any form whatsoever..the use of the word ain’t, even in fun, meant getting grounded…..maybe that’s why i use gonna…

Aw, Shucks, dmac! I ain’t gonna take yer arse out to the woodshed ;-)

…on-purpose triangulation of it by some to act like a ‘hick’ or to be ‘funny’, irritates me

dmac, I hasten to assure that you are not the target. Yes, I saw that you had used “gunna” today, and I chalked it up to infection by misexample.

What you so well characterise in the blockquote above is, alas, the situation obtaining.

When ones ideas and arguments are expressed verbally or in writing, they perforce depend upon good usage of the language employed to express them. And when such use of language is, as in the offending cases here, sloppy, the ideas and their presentations are vitiated. Indeed, it has got to the point where I no longer read comments expressed in this foul abuse of English, which language I revere.

RevBev wisely suggests that this game may not be worth the candle. I would like to call attention to this wonderful true story. Charles Doughty wrote what remains, nearly a century on, the standard work on Arabia. It is entitled _Travels In Arabia Deserta_. It is one of the monuments of English prose style. Doughty was asked why he undertook this massive work, and he replied that

…[I]t was to rescue the English language from the slough of despond into which it had fallen after Chaucer.