How to Talk Yankee

By Gerald E. Lewis

Book Overview

Even if you've mastered ayuh and can use wicked properly and effortlessly, you won't want to miss this expanded edition of How to Talk Yankee. With dozens of new entries and additional illustrations... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0945980078
• ISBN13: 9780945980070
• Release Date: August 2014
• Publisher: North Country Press
• Length: 66 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Wicked goo-ud, ayuh!

I went to college in Maine and bought this first North Country Press printing soon after it came out in 1989. The original book was published ten years prior. People really do speak this way, at least older generations, as well as in rural areas (of which there are many in Maine!). To be fair, there are of course regional dialects across America and many have been well parodied. To wit, Southern, North Central (think "Minnesoooota"), Californian. The author himself acknowledges an earlier effort in this genre: How to Speak Southern Like that one, How to Talk Yankee is a slim volume. It's also the only reference book I can think of without page numbers. No matter, the entries are spot on and the illustrations from (now well-known) Maine humorist Tim Sample are simple yet funny. I just realized that while there is no index nor systematic cross-referencing, any word that is italicized within an entry is itself defined elsewhere in this guide. This probably has limited appeal for actually using the language. But to the extent that it provides a window into Maine culture, it is a cheap, easy, and enjoyable way to get some Down East flavor. As Maine comedian Kendall Morse said, "You have to have more than a teaspoonful of brains to understand Maine humor." One personal observation is that the usage of "son of a whore" (son of a ho-ah) is similar to the Italian-American "forget about it" (forgetaboudit); it can be positive or negative, or plenty of degrees in between. Remember that great scene in Donnie Brasco where the myriad intimations are debated? Forgetaboudit! Anyway, if you really want to learn to talk Yankee, you should probably move to Maine (and live there for the next seventy-five years, gorry!), or you can try to find this obscure companion piece: How to Talk Yankee A Downeast Foreign Language Record

Yankee Speaks for Itself

I grew up in Maine, and, in the early eighties you weren't living in the state unless you owned a copy of the Bert and I (a record) and How to Talk Yankee (the book). How to Talk Yankee is a brilliant spoof of the dictionary, the Yankee dialect, and Linguistics as a study. Material covered in this book includes grammar "So don't I" pronunciation "there are no R's in the middle of words... hahse, Cah, except where they don't belong," Ayuh "THE WORD!" and inevitability, "You'll never fool a yankee, but you may fool other 'summer people'..."The art in the book only adds to the humor, the cover (someone from "out of town" looking at the book and trying to translate "Ayer") illustrates perfectly how exasperating it can be to try to understand a "down-easter" who speaks "English."The book in it's manner spoofs not only the language of the "yankee" but is really a spoof of guidebooks and their genre. I can't recommend this book highly enough, a must for everyone who has ever been to Maine, taken a linguistics class, or tried to use a "convenient guidebook."