One doesn’t have to wait long before someone new to this area remarks on the way we in northern New Mexico “sing” many of our expressions.
Whereas many people say, “I know,” around here, it’s usually something like “Eee guyy, I knoouuww.” And that’s only a slight exaggeration.
I’ve been told I need to sing up more. My voice is naturally soft, and regrettably, more and more people say “what?” when I speak. If I ask a stranger for the time, the reply will invariably be “What?” Often the “what?” is rendered as “eh?” But that response is generally reserved for government workers.
In the fifties, at Immaculate Conception school, we used to practice saying “excuse me,” or “please repeat that” or even just “please,” when we didn’t understand what another was saying. But those responses have gone the way of thank-you notes for graduations and weddings. Now it’s “huh?”
But lest I go too far afield, moaning about manners, I must mention a recent, and polite, exchange of conversation that took place in a foreign country.
We’d been in the Cincinnati area for a family reunion and decided to take a ferry across the Ohio River to twin city Covington, Ky. How could we have known we’d entered a time warp? THAT was the foreign country.
I’ve mentioned numerous times that television and movies, things observed by the masses, tend to standardize the language. That phenomenon has been occurring for decades.
Except for Covington, Ky.
As we got off the ferry, we went on foot to a burger emporium, where I ordered sandwiches for the five of us. It took a while to accomplish that feat. Whereas I was about to say, politely, that I didn’t understand what the attendant was saying, the teenie-bopper behind the counter (politely) said, “You talk funny, you know.” However, I heard something different, a dialect that is hard to repeat here.
Word endings there simply disappear. “Hamburger” becomes something like “hambur,” and “Diet Coke” comes out as “dieco.” A customer, who apparently had never seen genuine New Mexicans, asked us where we’d been on our trip. How we understood the question still baffles me, much of the communication being done by gestures, as we pointed in the direction of the ferryboat.
“We’ve been to Columbus, Ohio,” my wife Bonnie said. That got nowhere. Then I tried, over-articulating each syllable: “Co-lum-bus, O-high-o.” Finally, the customer said, “Oh, why didn’t you tell us yall were in Klumbs, Aha?”
They say “Aha” and WE talk funny? We speak the General American dialect, as does most of the country. And yet, the denizens of a midwestern city of 50,000 speak a different tongue.
Apparently the young woman wanted to know the kinds of condiments we wanted for our burgers: maynaze, muster, picks, ungyuns, etc. Had the young woman been speaking German or Finnish, we wouldn’t have been any more confused.
We settled the issue by having her point to each ingredient. I thought for a second that my own Spanish accent, which pops up when I’m tired, rushed or excited, may have convinced the restaurant attendant that we had just stepped off the boat, which we had.
The subsequent conversation went surprisingly smoothly, our coming together on some common terms. But it still smarted, hours later, when I re-thought about the exchanges and how I might have initiated the dialogue by saying she spoke funny. She beat me to it.
In the land of Covington, common English monosyllabic words become two syllables, but there’s no predictable pattern. Some two-syllable words get elided and become a single sound. “Cake” they pronounce “kayak.” Hearing that rendition, I immediately thought of the time an Eskimo built a fire in his kayak to keep warm, but it burned down, proving you can’t have your kayak and heat it too. My instinct was to attempt that joke, but I convinced myself that cake would have fallen.
We picked up a few Kentuckyisms, including “he-it” for “hit,” as in “He he-it me.” And the residents of Covington know that the “you,” which can be singular or plural, can be confusing. That’s why we heard the wait-pusson ask us, “Kin I tay-uk yall’s ord?”
Later that day we walked the several blocks of downtown, stepping into drugstores, hotels, department stores, gas stations and even a German church, of which they appear to have several, hoping to prove that the burger wait-pusson was an anomaly. She wasn’t. We heard similar inflections from most other residents. Too often, on our reflections on select dialectical inflections, we neglect key observations. Those who read Snuffy Smith comic strips may assume the Covingtonians sit in overalls around a cracker barrel, remaining on the lookout for revenuers. Whereas we’re fascinated by the way people all across America use the same words but pronounce them so differently, we don’t think any dialect is superior — just different.
Far from a benighted back-woods suburb of Dogpatch, Covington is quite urban; the downtown area is spiffed up, and the people appear well-educated and upper-middle class. Extremely friendly, most were just as happy to answer our questions about their articulation as they were curious about ours.
Through family reunions we’ve made the Ohio trip several times. Perhaps we’re simply good assimilators of language, but in no case did we ever have cause to think of Buckeye diction as anything but standard.
But once I asked one of my wife’s uncles, a long-time Cincinnati resident, if he’d ever been on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River. His reply: “Waill, I been there wunst or twyst.”
And people say WE talk funny.