Recently, I was given a ride home from the car dealership while my husband’s car was being repaired, and the driver, as he talked on the phone, reminded me of my Maine grandmother. He asked the person on the other end, “Where are you at?” using the same language my nana used on the phone when she inquired into our whereabouts. Then he said, “I can’t get theah” for “I can’t get there.” It was as if Nana were in the car – and not only in my mind.
Nana would say she was cooking in the “spider,” referring to the black iron skillet that she liked to use to make cornbread or, in the morning, scrambled eggs.
If anyone came into the room dressed inappropriately, she would say that the person was dressed “nekked (that is, naked) as a worm.” There was no showing of the midriff or wearing very short shorts in her presence.
When I hear people trying to imitate the New England accent on television or at the movies, I cringe. They just don’t get it right. They try to sound like John F. Kennedy, and it doesn’t fit. The accent is much more subtle and involves using certain words like “frappe” for a milkshake and “jimmies” for sprinkles and “submarine” or “sub” for a big sandwich, with ham and cheese and tomato and green pepper slices. Sometimes the term “Italian” is also used for the same sandwich.
And it isn’t just the different vocabulary. It also involves phrases and sentences and references to organizations that don’t exist today.
Nana would say that we should go to bed that night “when it got dark under the dining table,” a saying that must have developed when kerosene lamps were used on the farm. She said it was going to rain when we passed fields and saw the cows sitting down in the field. When we were doing something that she didn’t like, she would say, “If you continue doing that until the cows come home, you are going to be in big trouble.”
Nana loved going to the Grange Hall for programs and the Ladies’ Aid for all-day gatherings at different women’s beach properties. Her references to the Ladies’ Aid and Grange were common talk among women her age in Maine.
The Maine accent and lingo are rarely heard in our modern world of Midwestern news accents and a bland national vocabulary, but when I do hear it and am charmed by it, I think of Nana.
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