Modern Boston slangs, idioms

[paraph]

Hey there folks,
I need a little help with current Boston area slang. My attempts at googling have brought me to multiple, dubious travel guides and endless copy-paste pages whose info seems to originate from the Boston page of the Language Schools site and relies heavily on an exaggerate Boston accent

Comments

[corkyduke]

I've lived on the north shore of MA my entire life and I've ALWAYS called it a water bubbler! I had no idea it was a weird thing to say until I went to college and one of my neighbors was from the only other place in the world where they call it that (somewhere in Wisconsin) and people picked on us :(

- blinker/directional - turn signal
- breakdown lane - shoulder of the road
- carriage - shopping cart or baby stroller
- rotary - roundabout
- cruiser - police car
- the T - the subway (so ingrained that my brother can't stop calling the London underground "the T" no matter how many times I correct him)
- statie - state police officer
- hair elastic - hair tie?
- soda! (though older people call it "tonic")
- young men call each other "kid" or "son"... ("yeah, kid!" or "this f*ckin' kid...")
- "idiot" is a favorite
- offensive words like r*tarded and f*ggot are thrown into every other sentence, it seems
- jokes about the terrible conditions of the public roads
- jokes about police details (police officers get paid overtime to stand on the side of the road and casually direct traffic around work men)
- a lot of slang is a play on locations, roads, well-known places (clubs, pubs, restaurants, etc.), and famous people (often athletes or local politicians)

I don't know how much Boston-area speech patterns and idioms would apply to upper middle class people, though. In my experience those sort of people think they are "above" the typical MA way of speaking. If you want to know more about it, though, I'd watch a film like Gone, Baby, Gone. That's the most accurate representation I've ever seen. Not upper middle class by a long shot, though!

[bleodswean]

Hahahahaha. Yes, spot-on. Idear!!!

Descended from a long line of Boston Irish here. Folks always tease with "did you pahk the cah?" because, apparently, that's hysterical with a Boston twang. Oh, and family reunions resound with a tortured eye-rolling "Mawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww" when calling one's mother, or groaning when mothers trot out embarrassing stories about offspring.

BIA's also seem to use "herself" and "himself" a lot.

Denis Leary is a good source as is much of Affleck's oeuvre. Especially "The Town". Or -

http://news.moviefone.com/2011/02/24/best-boston-movies/