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

[beccastareyes]

I'm not a Bostonian, but my extended family is, and I grew up in the Northeast (Long Island, not New England) from birth until age 10. It's definitely soda, unless you are a great-grandparent (when it's tonic).

One of the local ones that's not part of even New York English is that the candy bits that go on ice cream are jimmies, not sprinkles.

Some things I remember from moving to Nebraska:
1. Northeasterners shovel their sidewalk, Midwesterners scoop.
2. Northeasterners use a bag for their groceries, Midwesterners use a sack.
3. Pecan and Italian are pronounced differently. (my Boston-native mother says PEE-can, I say pe-KAHN. Mom notes Nebraskans tend to say EYE-talian, not ih-TAL-ian.)

'Wicked' as an intensifier is stereotyped as a Boston expression. My cousins from Braintree do use that one, but maybe not as often.

[tlatoani]

I'm in Michigan, and based on your 1 and 2, we're not part of the Midwest. So I'd be careful with those, I think they're more localized than you believe.

[beccastareyes]

Ah, good point! I should specify Nebraskans, which I am used considering the central part of the country, but that's somewhat different from the states around the Great Lakes.

[mimerki]

Ohio, but this holds true for me as well.

I have never heard a real person say Eye-talian. I probably say pecan pick-on (I've said it a bunch now, such that none of it sounds natural.)

[greenblnktbooks]

Hi there- I grew up in the Boston area, so I thought I might be able to offer a little insight... I'll just preface this, though, by saying that I haven't lived in MA for a while (although I visit frequently) and I was originally from outside of Boston (Worcester area) so I don't know if there's a very big difference in speech patterns. As far as I know, there isn't, but

[funwithrage]

But if your character is more high class, he probably won't be using that. Ha, maybe. ;) I'd describe my background as "upper middle class" and pretty much everyone of my generation swears as punctuation

[full_metal_ox]

...Mom and I had a guy in Pittsburgh slow down to let us cross the street, and both of us were like "...is this a ruse?")

Pittsburgh--where merging is a martial art! (Disclaimer: the foregoing observation is based on the space of one weekend's visit every summer.)

[elialshadowpine]

I lived in the Boston area (Sharon, technically) from beginning of 2005-end of 2008, and man, I noticed wicked used a lot like that. It was a point of confusion because I have a lot of Brit friends and tend to pick up idioms that friends use (this has resulted in a rather mixed vocabulary and nobody can ever pinpoint my background), so I was using wicked = cool, and they were ... "WTF

[lyonesse]

*raises bostonian hand*

shovel the sidewalk. (and the parking spot, and put a chair in it to claim it; cause of many neighborly battles.)

breakfast, lunch, dinner.

blinker. (a recent highway sign said: CHANGING LANES? USE YAH BLINKAH.)

soda.

"yeah?" might be our "n'est-ce pas?"

"wicked" is the canonical local word for "extremely".

also, people here never wait for the walk signal, they just look both ways and cross when they deem it safe.

[auralan]

People also cross when they hit a critical mass of pedestrians to be able to challenge the cars. This is especially true in Harvard Square where cars move slowly and there are tons of pedestrians.

Also, nobody says subway. You take the T.

[lyonesse]

well....it's the t around here. but if i go down to new york, what i ride *there* isn't the t, it's the subway.

the bus between here and there is the "chinatown bus" even if i get the one from alewife, btw :)

[anonymous]

Me: 20, lived in an upper/upper-middle class suburb of Boston my whole life (Brookline), and currently go to school here

[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

[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/