Precerpt from In with the East Wind: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life (Leaver)

Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication from the forthcoming memoir, In with the East: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver

Talking Mainiac

Beyond just the Acadian influence, as in the use of fir balsam to refer to balsam fir trees, the Maine dialect can be difficult to understand for people “from away” (outsiders). Once I left Maine and started living and working in other parts of the USA, it took years and even some speech therapy, before I could blend in ways that did not mark me like the time I was helping out with collecting demographic information in Florida and had difficulty communicating with one of the residents.

“Where do you come from?” he asked.

“I am American,” I responded.

“So am I,” he said, “but I did not just get off the boat.” My clarification that I grew up in Maine did nothing to dissuade him from his conviction that I really was a foreigner and had no business asking him any questions.

The Maine dialect can sound like a different language altogether. To confuse matters, there are at least two different dialects of native speakers of English (putting French aside for the moment): southern Maine, which encompasses the area up to 90 miles north of Boston, and “down Maine,” which refers to the more northern reaches of Maine.

Bypassing a complete linguistic treatise of the dialectology of the area in which I grew up, the aspects of the way I spoke that would get me stares, requests for repetition, and responses not pertinent to anything I had actually said included speech tempo and a difference in some sounds (and not just vowels), some syntax, some morphology, and some lexical items. I found out about these things not only as a result of majoring in linguistics and studying topics like dialectology but also as a result of ending up in the office of the Chair of the Speech Department every Thursday afternoon, learning to speak John American (at that time, 50 years ago, the standard English taught to and spoken by the press—now an artifact of the past) in order to be understood in public speaking events where I represented the Penn State University (very different dialectal area) as a member of the university’s debate club.

Vowels were a big deal. “K’n” was not understood as can. “Kahf” was not understood as calf. “Poah” was not understood as poor. “Pahty” was not party and was even misunderstood as potty by one of my roommates! “Pahk” was not understood as park. “Hahvid” was not understood as Harvard or “Stanfid” as Stanford. And, oh, the infamous /o/ sound that is very clearly a diphthong in words that contain /or/, like the utensil for eating. New Englanders, who are finely attuned to vowel sounds often to the disregard of the consonants that come with them, would never mistake their pronunciation of “fohk” as anything other than fork though outsiders often mistake it for a common obscenity. Once, a visiting friend from Philadelphia did not have a complete table setting and indicated to my mother that she needed one more item.

“What is it?” asked my mother.

“Well, I’m not gonna say it the way you say it,” my friend responded, turning red.

Then, there is that interesting /er/ ending. Not only do Mainiacs write it differently than most the rest of the USA in some cases, thanks to the British influence in their speech, they also pronounce it differently. We have town centres and local theatres. We refer to them as sentahs and theatahs. The same pronunciation applies to words like here (“heah”) and there (“theah”).

When followed by the word is or are (there may be more such verbs that are not coming to mind—it’s been a while since I have been home), the words elide, so that one can hear: Mothasheah.

But there is something else that can happen with -er endings followed by verbs that start with a vowel. What linguists call an “intervocalic /r/” can appear, linking the two words. Thus, Cuba is an island is pronounced as “Kuberis an island” or “that ideeris supah” (that idea is super).

But there is more…As a result of my generation misunderstanding (misinheriting) the underlying r-add code (the description linguists use for dialects like Mainiac and Bostonian), which requires adding the /r/ only intervocalically, my generation, dialectal researchers discovered, began to add the intervocalic /r/ as a final sound after any word ending in a vowel, even when not followed by a verb beginning with a vowel as in I am going to Kuber and I have an ideer. (My parents would say Cuba and idea if there were no following word.) Linguists become excited about things like this because it is rare to be able to observe such clear-cut dialectal changes from one generation to the next and be able to identify obvious developmental reasons for them.

There are other things that make Mainiac hard to understand. For those of us from southern Maine, that usually consists of elisions beyond those typically used by other speakers of English—elisions do occur everywhere, as in the case of “I’m gonna do it” (I am going to do it) and “I wanna win” (I want to win)—an example of which, is “I want gonna do it” (I wasn’t going to do it) and “hapas nine” (9:30), among many more possibilities.

             These elisions can make it sound like my husband’s description of my mother’s speech: “She starts a first sentence, then skips to the end of the following sentence.” No, she doesn’t. It is just all those elisions.

             They have mostly been eliminated from my speech now—except after a conversation with someone from Maine. “You been talking to Ma?” my husband would ask when he heard a lot of Mainiac cropping up from me.

             A colleague in Washington, DC was equally nonplussed when Ma came to visit me there. She called me at work for some reason, and my colleague answered the phone. Turning to me, he said, “It’s your mothah.”

             “What does she want?” I asked.

             “I don’t know,” he responded. “The only words I understood were ‘Betty Lou’ and ‘mothah.’”

             The past tense in Mainiac can also be difficult for those “from away,” including those outside the northern reaches of Maine. People down East (so called because lumberjacks used to float logs down the rivers which ran northeast, which later spawned the term, Down Maine, for locations located in the northern Maine) say things like “The barn is het” (has heat), “I het the room” (turned on the heat), or “I het the eggs” (heated them up). One can also say, “I et the eggs” (ate them). Put that together with the -or/-er endings, and you get something like, “I want gonna het yoah cohn” (I was not going to heat up your corn).

             My kids, who facilely switch between “Ant Jan”(my husband’s Pittsburgh sister) and “Ahnt Sheeler” (my sister Sheila), equally easily parse my speech when it sometimes flaunts Mainiac trappings, including elided sounds that flash past like river rapids, but I think even they would have difficulty understanding my late grandfather, Pop, who hailed from down Maine where he had worked as a lumberjack and blacksmith. If you were to ask him where some place was, he would be likely to say, “It’s a fur piece down the rud” (a long way down the road).

             As for lexical items, well, there are a quite few, starting with the famous “ayuh” (yes) and “so suh” (no). Many have to do with Maine lifestyle. Sometimes, when it is “snowing like a bastahd,” you can’t see past your “doahyahd” (dooryard = driveway + front yard), and it is probably “wicked cold” (very cold).

             Some have to do with Maine products. Birch beer? (You have heard of root beer, right? Similar item, different source.) How about sarsaparilla? (Also whets the whistle.) Oh, and Moxie! That will put “whiskahs” on your toenails! Have you ever had a maple square (generally, circular; it is like a raised doughnut but covered with maple frosting with crème inside; I’ve looked “all over hell’s kitchen” for them elsewhere, in vain, to my disappointment because they are “wicked good”). How about a whoopie pie? (Like a huge ding dong, and also wicked good.) Other foods that might be a new taste for those from “far away” are “cohn chowdah” (corn chowder), fiddleheads, johnny cake (corn bread baked in a round pan), brown bread (made from rye with molasses, steamed in a can, and served with baked beans), and “lobstah rolls” (not expensive if purchased from country stores). And speaking of lobster, do you know what constitutes “gear” (the equipment for the boat)? Ot what is a keeper? (A legal sized lobster without eggs.) An egger? (You guessed it!)
             Then there are things that exist elsewhere but are named differently. A “bubbla” (bubbler) is a water fountain. (Makes sense, right? Water bubbles out of it.) Tonic is soda pop, not some kind of elixir. That use of the word completely, with Maine dialect, totally confused my roommate when I arrived at Penn State and disappeared for a few minutes.

             “Where did you go,” she asked.
             “Downstairs, to get some tonic.”
             “Are you ill?” she expressed concern.
             “No,” I responded. “I was thirsty.”

             Not only did I confuse my roommate, I also confused the person at the counter in the ice cream shop. I asked for a “frap” (frappe = milkshake elsewhere, but milk shakes in Maine are simply whipped milk, i.e. milk that is shaken, on a machine). The conversation went like this:
             “Do you have frappes? I do not say any listed, but I saw someone drinking one.”
             “What is it?”
             “Ice cream with milk.”
             “Oh, you mean a milkshake.”
             “No, I want ice cream in it!”
             Total confusion!

             Similarly, my husband constantly got caught off-guard as a coffee drinker, who drinks his coffee black. He ordered coffee, and the server asked, “Regular?”

             “Yes,” he said, assuming the question had to do with being caffeinated, but when the server brought the coffee to him, it had cream and milk! It caught every time the first time we ordered coffee whenever we went to Maine.

             There are also things that are the same as elsewhere but expressed differently. For example, we do not go to a cabin, we go “upta camp.” We go “clamming” (digging up clams on a beach), snomashinin (snowmobiling), and “camp out in the back 40” (spend the night on the far edges of our property). We keep our veggies “down sellah” (in the cellar/basement), especially rutabaga and parsnips. We eat “grindahs” (grinders = sub sandwiches), drive through rotaries (roundabouts), “hang a u-ey” (make a u-turn) when we miss our exit, wear “rubbahs” (rubbers = galoshes), tie up our hair and other things with elastics (rubber bands), put “jimmies” (chocolate sprinkles) on our ice cream, buy “hamburg” (ground beef) at the store, wear johnnies (hospital gowns) in the hospital, control our TVs with “clickahs” (clicker = remote control), catch fireflies (lightning bugs), and get annoyed with “leaf peepahs” (leaf peepers = tourists who come to see the fall foliage), especially when we have been “right out straight” (super busy) all day.

             To this day, I prepare New England pot roast (beef, usually chuck, root veggies, and broth) for special meals and taught my husband and kids how to make it. People outside Maine often call it Yankee pot roast, but what they do not understand is how the word, Yankee, is used. Foreigners call Americans Yankees. Americans call New Englanders Yankees. New Englanders call those in northern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont) Yankees, and we people in Maine and New Hampshire call Vermonters Yankees. So, to us Mainiacs, New England pot roast cannot be Yankee pot roast. It might look the same, taste the same, and have the same ingredients, but it is not Yankee pot roast!

             Finally, there are things that are the same but different. Fried clams in Maine (and New Hampshire) are whole-bellied clams, not just the tiny neck that you get elsewhere. New England clam chowder is white, not pink. We have hand-raised mussels and diver-caught scallops. Boston baked beans have molasses or maple syrup and pieces of salted pork. Shepherd’s Pie is made with ground beef, creamed corn, and mashed potatoes.

             I do my best to control the lexical items, and the grammar, and the pronunciation, and the elision-created rapids often consciously and equally often without conscious effort thanks to years away. Still, in one way or another, Mainiac talk has followed me all the days of my life.

Book Description:

From the barefoot freedom of rural Maine to the diplomatic halls of Central Asia, from rescuing a dying child in Siberia to training astronauts in Houston and Star City, In with the East Wind traces an extraordinary life lived in service, not strategy.

Unlike those who chase opportunity, the author responded to it—boarding planes, crossing borders, and stepping into urgent roles she never sought but never declined. Over 75 years and 26 countries, she worked as a teacher, soldier, linguist, professor, diplomat, and cultural ambassador. Whether guiding Turkmen diplomats, mentoring Russian scholars, or founding academic programs in unlikely places, her journey unfolded through a steady stream of voices asking: Can you come help us?

Told through an alphabetical journey across places that shaped her—from Acton, Maine to Uzbekistan—this memoir is rich with insight, adventure, and deep humanity. At its heart lies the quiet power of answering the call to serve, wherever it may lead.

Like Mary Poppins, she drifted in with the East Wind—bringing what was needed, staying just long enough, and leaving behind transformation. Then she returned home, until the next wind called.

From the forthcoming book:

In with the East Wind...A Mary Poppins Kind of Life
Volume 1: ABC Lands

by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver

For more posts about this book, click HERE.

For more posts by and about Betty Lou Leaver, click HERE.

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