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26 October 2007

Best word to say in a Boston accent ever: [More:]Scofflaw.

No. Really. Try it.

"Scawf-lore."
Outstanding, it's a good one. Half of my family is from Mass and thus I've spent a million days there in my life. As a teenager I would slip off to Boston to hang out with a disreputable crowd that was different from the disreputable crowd I ran with in New York. I had a friend named Punk Rock Sean who you could always walk up to and say "Seanie, say park the car in Harvard Yard" and he'd look at you for a second and then say "Waaaat, aahhhh you fahhhkin retaaaahhded?"

Oh god, I never got tired of that.
posted by Divine_Wino 26 October | 22:46
Oh how i loathe the extreme boston/cranston accent.
And i love accents.
But that one just rubs me the wrong way.
It's possible jersey dialect poisoning.
posted by ethylene 26 October | 22:48
The "fuckin' retahded" is an exception to all, i have to say.
posted by ethylene 26 October | 22:49
Y'know, I don't think I've ever heard an authentic Boston accent. Plenty of actorly re-creations, yes, but I don't know that I've ever run a cross a native speaker.

I'm sad now.
posted by bmarkey 26 October | 22:50
The key to the Brooklyn accent is to "den-Ta-Lize ya TeeTH."
posted by ethylene 26 October | 22:50
i do love the fargo north michigan "don'cha ya know."
posted by ethylene 26 October | 22:52
I love the Boston Honk and the (now very rare) Brooklyn Bark. I have (more and more each year) the modified old NY Cawfee Dawg fuwkin wudderver yo Queens drawl in my speech. It appears when I'm not actually thinking about what I'm going to say and always when I'm agitated or pissed or excited. The same way you can always tell if I'm really mad at someone because I call them "money."

I don't mind it, but I don't know why it's crept in so late in the game.
posted by Divine_Wino 26 October | 22:59
Science Girl and I go back and forth as to the existence of a Northwest accent. She says there is no such thing, yet she says "bag" and "beg" exactly the same way. (They both sound like "beg".) To my ear, it's got bits of the California up-talking thing mixed in with some Canadian and Scandanavian influences.
posted by bmarkey 26 October | 22:59
i reflexively snarl when people say "money."
posted by ethylene 26 October | 23:02
I think the Rhode Island accent has the best of both worlds (New York + Boston). I love it so.

Except it's weird to hear myself slip involuntarily into the accent if I get annoyed or angry; I sound just like my dad.
posted by CitrusFreak12 26 October | 23:11
A friend of mine was in a Boston punk band in the seventies that they named "Art Yard" just to hear how the natives would mangle the pronunciation.
posted by octothorpe 26 October | 23:21
i reflexively snarl when people say "money."

Yeah, no, exactly. It's a hostile thing to say.
posted by Divine_Wino 26 October | 23:25
Didn't they do the soundtrack for "The Rural Juror"?
posted by ethylene 26 October | 23:26
the Rhode Island accent has the best of both worlds (New York + Boston)

Absolutely, agreed.

Even weirder was the first time I visited New Orleans and noted that at least some of the accents were a slightly Creole-inflected Brooklyn.
posted by Lipstick Thespian 26 October | 23:36
Aaaht yawwd? Whaat ay ya, ah fahkin retaaahd?


The rare yat accent in New Orleans captured my heart (rarer since Katrina) is glorious. "Haw yiz doowin? Awrite? Baybee, ya et yet?"

Grown men calling each other baby with no irony and no shame is one of the best things I've ever heard.

Algiers, the Irish channel, god fucking dammit I do know what it means to miss New Orleans.
posted by Divine_Wino 26 October | 23:49
I wrote "ya et yet", but in thinking about it, it's "Yiz et yet?", the "yiz" is the great sound. I sometime say "How yiz doin'" and then regret my affectation, but I can't help it, it's too good.

"Yiz et yet? I jus made groceries, come in and have a lil sumthin'"

Such good people.
posted by Divine_Wino 26 October | 23:59
We should compile a metachat patois.
posted by ethylene 27 October | 00:09
Rhode Island Is LONG Island and MA crossed...and I've loathed it since having a slutty cop's daughter as a roommate for my first three weeks of freshman year.

I'd much rather hear misplaced r's than nasal whine.
posted by brujita 27 October | 00:31
"Hot buttered popcorn" was what I would make all my friends from Mass say.
posted by SassHat 27 October | 01:53
I got into a rather nasty argument with someone about this very thing: many British people are under the (very, very) mistaken impression that there aren't many regional accents in the states (because everyone on TV sounds the same). In Britain, there are thousands of variations all tightly packed into one small island. You can literally travel 10 miles and hear a big difference... so naturally people here assume that they've cornered the accent market.

There are just as many in the states, they're just spread further apart. The Baaaaaaaahston accent is very different to say, the accent in Madison or San Diego or Austin or Seattle.

No one believes me. Fucking television... it makes us look so homogenous.
posted by chuckdarwin 27 October | 04:12
I was just in Boston. As far as I can figure, the rule is to squirrel away the R's from any words that have them, say AAAAAH type a's, and then recycle all those R's on any word ending in a vowel. Such as "good ideaaahr to paahk mah caah there."

Also, positivly everything is "wicked aaahwesome"
posted by dabitch 27 October | 04:50
Alsao - make Bostonians say the word "pear". It's wicked aaahwesome.
posted by dabitch 27 October | 04:52
Rhode Island Is LONG Island and MA crossed

Nope. Sorry, but it just plain isn't. Haha. I first heard the Long Island accent last year in college, and to this day it grates against my soul. Rhode Island accents are nowhere near Long Island accents, much closer to Brooklyn accents I'd say.

Unless you're thinking of Cranston accents. That's a horse of a different collor. Very nasal, also grates against the center of my being.
posted by CitrusFreak12 27 October | 11:19
Oh but you know what I hate? And this applies to any accent which causes one to do this: Room pronounced "rum."

You do not sleep in a bottle of alcohol and the covering of your house was not named by your dog (ruff). It's ROOM. Like RUE.
posted by CitrusFreak12 27 October | 11:20
Oh yes it is! I had three weeks of living with slutty cop's girl( from Providence) , the rest of the year living next to her in a sixties era dorm with paper thin walls (during which time she contracted scabies, passed it on and everyone thought it was the crabs), a semester at University of Bridgeport before the moonies bought it; at the time crawling with people from Long Island, and my last BA credits at Emerson in Boston, which makes everyone take two speech classes--one of which works on getting one to speak with the generic broadcaster's American accent. There was another girl from Rhode Island in one of those classes. I know what I'm talking about.
posted by brujita 27 October | 12:14
Heh, not to mention that Brooklyn is part of Long Island. :P

The people I know that are from Long Island have accents that are distinctly not Rhode Island, in my opinion, but perhaps the parts of their accents that I don't notice are the parts that are extremely similar to RI accents. It strikes me as very nasal and just sounds... I don't know. Jewish? I hear it and just think of Jewish mothers. Was Slutty Cop's Girl from East Providence? There is (was?) a very large Jewish and Irish population on the East Side.

This is a great example of the Long Island accents I hear at college.

The Rhode Island accent I know and love reminds me not of jewish mothers but of Italians, the sopranos, the mob, etc. It is, at many times, completely inscrutable to those not used to it. What'suhmatta w'you? Youseguyz. Fugheddaboutit. I got an idear. It's acrosst the road. My favorite example is one my father says often: "Jeet? K, sko," which means "Did you eat? Ok, let's go."

A great example of the RI accent is this scene from Brotherhood. They do a damn good job.

So yeah. Similarities? Yes. But they're extremely different.
posted by CitrusFreak12 27 October | 13:15
Years ago on vacation, I was standing in line behind two people having a conversation with very heavy, noticable "Fargo"-type accents. We struck up a conversation and I said, "So...where are you from? I'm going to guess Wisconsin." And the woman replied, "Ya! And you're from Philadelphia, then?" I didn't even realize I had an accent. Ugh. Philly accents are so UGLY.
posted by jrossi4r 27 October | 13:23
I don't know what part of town slutty was from; her last name was LeBoeuf. The RI girl's last name at Emerson was Strickland--her accent sounded exactly the same to me as the roommate from hell.
posted by brujita 27 October | 15:24
The Farrelly Bros. Set most of their work in RI. I didn't say that the RI and Long Island accents were alike; I said RI was LI mixed up with MA, which makes sense geographically.
posted by brujita 27 October | 15:32
The only thing I've heard that is a Northwestern accent is from people who live in Eastern WA or are from there - they get rid of their A sounds in favor of E sounds:

Monday becomes Mundy, Tuesday becomes Tuesdy, etc.

My NE accent is coming right along - I've been known to drop a's and r's non-selfconciously, and I once referred to my career counselor as Sheiler.

I love Bostonian accents.
posted by Lipstick Thespian 27 October | 16:35
Oh, and to get the real deal for scofflaw, simply say the word scorefloor.

posted by Lipstick Thespian 27 October | 16:35
CitrusFreak12:

My mom, a daughter of Providence who has lived in California for over 20 years, gets asked if she's from Australia/New Jersey/England on a weekly basis. I go home for a week and my friends notice the accent seeping back into my voice (I left when I was 5).

*raises glass of coffee milk*
*pines for Del's*
posted by mdonley 27 October | 17:13
::clinks glasses with mdonley::
posted by CitrusFreak12 27 October | 17:57
I lived with a guy from Canton for 2 years; I used to make him tell me how the accent was subtly different in Revere or Malden, just because I enjoyed hearing him say Revere and Malden.
posted by ikkyu2 28 October | 12:37
I have been trying to say Revere and Malden with a Cantonese accent for the last few minutes, wondering what was special about that.

Okay, yeah, I get it now. Canton is some place around Boston. Go laugh at somebody else now.
posted by typewriter 28 October | 13:19
So Halloween is a high holy holiday here, right? || Nobody's posted about the MO yet.

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