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Port NewsWeekly Staff PickNovember 19, 2007 |
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I Got the Idear:
My Love Affair with Maine Language
by Marion Kingston Stocking
Maine Folklife Center, $15.00
AN ENDEAHING LOOK AT THE WAY MAINERS SPEAK
The Maine Folklife Center at the University of Maine has published its 40th issue of "Northeast Folklore," an annual publication that brings forth parts of its collection of traditional and cultural materials from and about Maine.
This year's book is I've Got the Idear: My Love Affair with Maine Language by Marion Kingston Stocking. Her work involves her placing many of her observations about Maine speech in the context of her memories of teaching at the University of Maine when many soldiers who had fought in World War II returned to school on the GI Bill. Intrigued by the way her students spelled the way they pronounced their words, Stocking began saving the samples, adding to them later with samples from literature, newspapers, signs, and other sources.
Marion Stocking earned a Ph.D in English from Duke University in 1952, and wrote her dissertation on the Byron/Shelley Circle: Claire Clairmont: A Biographical and Critical Study. Harvard University Press published her edition of The Journals of Claire Clairmont in 1968. She was Contributing Editor to Shelley and His Circle Vol. V, (Harvard, 1974). The NEH supported her overseas scholarship with a Research Fellowship in 1979, and the Johns Hopkins University Press brought out her two-volume The Clairmont Correspondence in 1995; it was judged “the Best Book in Language and Literature” for that year by the Scholarly Publishers Division of the Association of American Publishers.
Marion Stocking first became interested in regional dialects after she slipped in her yard and fell and hit her head on the family house. She writes, “Oh, it was memorable! Blood in my eyes, down my face, pulsing all over the new hall wallpaper. Arterial hemorrhages are spectacular. Here’s the picture: I was eight and had skidded on some acorns while running up the front walk to our Dutch Colonial house in a bedroom suburb of Boston. My forehead cracked against the corner of one of the brick pillars by the front steps. Next day I went to school with a dramatic bandage.”
“’ Hey, what happened to you?’
‘I hit my head on a pillar.’
Hysterical laughter: ‘You hit your head on a piller?’
‘Not that kind of a piller, dummy, a brick piller.’
‘Gee, at my house we’ve got feather pillers.’”
Much later, when she arrived in Orono to teach at the University, she ran into much bigger problems. She had some success with standard misspellings by incorporating instructive couplets:
“You wouldn’t believe a lie in a minute,
But the word believe has a lie right in it.”
“But,” she explains, “Maine spellings were a different matter. A student, revising, would cross out and rewrite a problem word two or three times, and unless he went to the dictionary he often as not spelled it the way it sounded. When I noted in the margin that I was amused by squarbell for squabble, the student was offended and scribbled: ’It wasn’t surpose to be funny.’ The first paper in which I marked morden came back with the word “corrected” to modren. Later I was to receive mordren. Interlectual was improved in another paper to interlectural. A word like propaganda was infinitely misspellable. I rather like propergander.”
After writing the previous paragraph, Stocking comments in an aside that her spell-check was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Here is a wonderful small book sparkling with examples of Maine life and language, with plenty of lobstah and chowdah citings and more to delight both natives and those from away. She also includes a bibliography and the list she jotted down as a teacher of all those Maine spellings.
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