Pahk the Cah

There was a mild earthquake late last night centered just north of the state capital, Concord, registering a 3.1 on the Richter scale. Most people think of California or South America when you mention earthquakes, but the reality is that the northeast is also riddled with fault lines, which occasionally stretch and groan. There's a reason the country's largest earthquake research center is at the largest SUNY University in Buffalo, N.Y., not in San Diego. Now, often when you see Midwesterners describe what the tornado sounded like before it hit their trailer park, they reference the loudest noise they know, a train, and compare the tornado to that. This being New Hampshire, however, one woman in the local WMUR news interview compared the earthquake to "a herd of moose stampeding through her front yard." She went outside the next morning and fully expected to see a pathway of moose tracks across her lawn. The local news told her otherwise.

When Americans visit New England, they fully expect to be treated to the 'New England accent,' in which a loud but flat-mouthed local says something like, "I didn't know wheh to pahk the cah." In truth, this is really a Bostonian accent. Other parts of New England have their own peculiar accents, like New Hampshire and Maine, which are fairly distinctive. (Mainers all talk like Milton Berle.) Worse, though, in part because of a large influx of dirty, rotten stinkin' foreigners (like me) and modern mass communications (TV, radio, internet, etc.), the truth is that few native New Englanders, including New Hampshirites, have any accent at all, instead speaking the common, bland middle-American English you hear on the nightly news. Still, while a dying breed, you still hear flickers of the New Hampshire accent in everyday life, especially as you get further from the coast and southern New Hampshire. One local celebrity, one Fritz Wetherbee, has taken up the crusade to save the New Hampshirite accent and has put out a CD of lessons, though this was done tongue-in-cheek. Some Bostonisms have permeated the whole region, however, such as "wicked" (e.g., "That was wicked good!") or "spitting" (e.g., "It's spitting rain out."), evolving into general New England expressions. Unfortunately, however, MacDonalds and Star Bucks will likely win, and we'll all end up sounding like Katie Couric. Until then, however, I'll be outside in the cah.