The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (52 page)

Slurvian.
What students of the New York accent now categorize as “first-stage Slurvian” was reported in the 1938 Federal Writers Project “Almanac for New Yorkers.” An example given was
onnafyah
.

The definition of
onnafyah,
as consumers of hurried meals in Manhattan know, is “a short order is being prepared.” The metaphor of a burger sizzling on the grill has since been extended to a more general “it’ll be ready in a minute,” whether or not applied to food. This brings to mind another first-stage Slurvian expression,
jeet?
, a quick way of asking someone if he has eaten.

Slurvian is not limited to New York City. The most famous example of slurred speech embodied in dialect is the southern
y’all,
which has its equivalent in New York Slurvian
alluhyuz
. (That’s if the emphasis is on the
all;
if the speaker wishes to stress the plural
you,
the phrase becomes
alluhyooz
.) And in California,
g’yonit
signifies “get on it,” meaning “get moving.”

These amalgams and other familiar interrogatory compressions—
tsamatta?, hootoadjadat?, whaddyanutz?
—have no meaning other than the phrases when separated: “What’s the matter? Who told you that? What are you, nuts?” Of greater semantic interest are the phrases that gain a separate sense when deliberately slurred. We will now consider “second-stage Slurvian.”

Linguists will not soon forget
fuggedaboudit
. Although the transliteration of the New Yorkese phrase has appeared on T-shirts around the country, the expression is not being dropped by Noo Yawkiz, which so often happens when a dialect phrase becomes adopted by outsiders. That is because the slurred words do not mean only the literal “forget about it”; rather, the phrase is second-stage Slurvian for “don’t bother me with that” or a more figurative “it’ll be a cold day in hell before I buy that cockamamie notion.”

The closest Slurvian synonym to
fuggedaboudit
is
gedaddaheeuh,
which long ago lost its initial meaning of “leave the premises” and now conveys disbelief shot through with an abiding disdain. Standing alone,
gedaddaheeuh
means “I don’t believe you” or the more vivid “don’t give me that baloney.” But when used in the start of a sentence like “
Gedaddaheeuh
wid yer fancy talk,” the disbelief turns to vehement rejection, in the sense of “I vigorously reject your highfalutin language.”

The sense of the compressed phrase is no longer the sum of its individual words; the compressed phrase conveys a meaning all its own. Another example of the semantic change called “figurative extension” that grew out of New York speedspeech is
noprollem,
which originally meant “I can do it easily” but now can be a modest response to gratitude with the primary sense of “you’re welcome.”

Derision at such elision is misplaced. The University of Pennsylvania’s William Labov, whose classic 1966 study,
The Social Stratification of English in New York City,
demonstrated that the city is a melting pot of various dialects, should be delighted. (I have been unable to pinpoint the locale of
gerareheeuh,
a variant of
gedaddaheeuh;
fresh street research is needed.)

The lexicographer Sol Steinmetz notes that the Brooklyn accent differs from Noo Yawkese: “
Oily boid
is Brooklynese,” he says, “as any Manhattanite or Bronxite will inform you in no
unsoyten toyms
. There is no standard New York pronunciation of words like
car, bad
and
off.
What we think of as ‘New Yorkese’ is the least prestigious of the various social dialects, or the one that differs or deviates most from standard American English. That is why New York speech has a low prestige even among its own speakers.”

Off
. I just pronounced that as I wrote it, and it sounded like “awf,” as in
awful,
not like “off” as in
offal
. For help on this, I turned to the pronunciation maven Charles Harrington Elster, author of
Is There a Cow in Moscow?
(Yes, but there is no
zoo
in zo-ology.)

“New York tawk features a diphthongal
aw
sound,” Elster observes, “that in heavy New Yorkese sounds almost disyllabic.” (Before a Parisian reader of this column in the
International Herald Tribune
expostulates, “
Gedaddaheeuh avec ton baratin,
” let me translate. A diphthong is the gliding sound of combining vowels, as in the
oy
in the head-smacking Yiddish
oy veh
.
Disyllabic
means “having two syllables.”) “It’s impossible for me to transliterate this elongated
aw
here, but ask a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker to pronounce
dog
and
coffee
and you’ll come close.

“New Yorkers are also renowned
r
-droppers,” Elster says. “Day eat wid a
fawk,
day walk onna
flaw,
an day drink adda
bah
. The superintendent of their apartment building is
da soopuh,
and the
New York Times
is
da paypuh
.” He agrees that “their propensity for slurvy pronunciation can sometimes be nothing short of miraculous. When I lived in New York, I remember how conductors on the Long Island Rail Road managed to slur the name of a certain station, Woodside, into the unintelligible
wuss-eye
(the eye of a wuss?).”

On hamburger that will “be ready in a minute,” I fear you are paying your researchers too much, thus forcing them into restaurants that employ wait-persons who do not use the expression heard virtually universally in the Big Apple, namely, “It’s coming right out,” or “it’ll be right out.”

Ask someone who eats in a luncheonette, a Chinese restaurant, a greasy spoon, or other places where the bourgeoisie take their nourishment
.

As for “r” droppers, the real epidemic hereabout comes in the form of the “t” droppers, people who intone
Atlanna, Toronno, innerception, cenner
in their manner of slurring speech
.

What next?

Melvin Poretz

Merrick, New York

I haven’t heard “gerareheeuh” in close to seventy years, and I’ve probably never seen it in print before. Unfortunately, I don’t live there anymore, and so I can’t do any street research for you, but I suspect there is a Yiddish connection. Mr. Weisberg, the landlaw nexdaw, used it alluhtime when he wahnid us to gedawf his propuhdy. Actually, it was more like “gerahfumheeuh,” but we got the idea. Perhaps the Slurvian phrase developed from the German/Yiddish “heraus,” meaning “out” or “outside,” which sounds a bit like “get out.”

Donald Berger

Hollywood, Florida

You mention that you have been unable to pinpoint the locale of
gerareheeuh,
a variant of
gedaddaheeuh.
I think it may come from the annals of immigration from Eastern Europe. I seem to recall an article entitled “Hungarians,” by I remember not whom, in
The New Yorker
about 35 years ago. The author describes his first days in public school in the United States, at which point he knew no English. So he transliterated the schoolyard expressions he heard into Hungarian, attempting to observe how they were used:
sarap
seemed to mean, “be quiet,” and
gerarahir
seemed to mean, “Go away.” Flip (or roll) the “r” and it sounds right
.

Lisa H. Newton

Fairfield University

Fairfield, Connecticut

When you talk about New Yorkers dropping “r’s” you know perfectly well that New Englanders do the same, and perhaps they corrupted the New Yawkuhs, or perhaps they all got it at once. I spent forty years of life in Boston, where they also ADD “r’s” where they do NOT belong (as in Kennedy’s “Cuber”). Not having lived in New York for any length of time, I’m not sure what New Yorkers do about adding “r’s” inappropriately. All I know is that I still say “fowdy” for forty, after twenty-five yeahs on the West Coast, although by now I do not say “Californier,” and sort of miss being called “Sheiler.”

Sheila Madden

Berkeley, California

You previously did a column, as I recall, on words that mean something different in other parts of the country, but are pronounced the same way. I have noticed a few. For example, in New York, a
wok
is a cooking instrument. In Chicago, you
wok
the dog (or dagh?) (In New York you
wuak
the
duag
). A friend in Iowa told me proudly, “My brother is a
liar!”
That is a strong Midwestern pronunciation for those who pass the bar!

I would suggest a real-life addition to your column about such New Yorkisms as
fuggedaboutit.
I used to work for a college president. He was from the Bronx and the college is in the Bronx. I was the chief financial officer. He used to ask,
yagotdanumbizz?
When the situation was more urgent, he would ask,
yagotdafreakinnumbizz?
Remembering that he was a college president with a PhD, he also referred to a large building on campus as the
lieberry.
When that was a subject of urgency, it became
dafreakinlieberry.

Michael J. McTague

Bronx, New York

“Gerareheeuh” I know as “gerradeheeuh,” I think that comes from Brooklyn. The evidence is in the name of one of the founders of Murder, Inc., usually printed as Gurrah Shapiro. In earlier days, when he proposed selling a shopkeeper “protection,” the response was “gurradeheeuh.” After a while, I think, people just paid off, but the name stuck
.

Robert W. Bertcher

East Rockaway, New York

As I remember hearing or reading, the original expression was “gurrareheeuh,” supposedly coined by Louis (Lepke) Buchalter (a Brooklyn-based Jewish gangster of the ’20s with a heavy accent). He allegedly used it so often that they started to call him Lepke “Gurrah” Buchalter, but probably not to his face
.

Annette Picard

Les Monts-de-Corsier, Switzerland

The Lower East Side mobster Louis Lepke Buchalter had a henchman, Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, a mean-spirited thug with a gruff, heavy accent who ordered people to “get out of here.” It came out as “Gurrah.” My father was a laundryman. He has the unenviable distinction of having paid protection money to Shapiro in the ’20s
.

Leonard Kian

Grand Rapids, Michigan

May I add a footnote to your word list of Slurvian? You speak of the well-known Brooklyn accent signalized by “the oily boid.” Modern Brooklynites only exaggerate what all of New York and New Jersey inherited from the Dutch, whose
eu
sounds halfway between our
er
in
early
and
oi.
It’s now gone, but one could still hear that gentle sound in the speech of Nicholas Murray Butler and Robert Livingston Schuyler, both at Columbia in my time
.

Jacques Barzun

San Antonio, Texas

Smashmouth.
“The word
smashmouth
is everywhere,” notes the
Times
education reporter Edward Wyatt: “the XFL, the title of a book about the presidential campaign, even in a certain columnist’s column. Everywhere, that is, except for the online
OED
. Worth a look?”

The XFL is a professional football league, co-owned by the World Wrestling Federation and NBC, that makes a fetish out of ferocity, with teams sporting macho and self-mocking names like “the New Jersey Hitmen” and “the Memphis Maniax.” The book is a campaign-trail memoir by Dana Milbank titled
Smashmouth: Two Years in the Gutter With Al Gore and George W. Bush
. The columnist is a right-wing vituperator who usually eschews vogue words, but in this case wrote of “the sort of
smashmouth
campaign that the Democrats perfected.”

The word’s meaning goes beyond “aggressive.” It is a new and especially vivid synonym of “brutal, savage, violent,” stopping just short of “heinous” and “barbaric.” However, in the XFL it has a self-mocking quality, and in politics it does not always carry such an offensive connotation. “Such nasty,
smashmouth
politics are said by the goody-goodies to be destroying our democracy,” goes Milbank’s thesis, “alienating the electorate and suppressing voter participation. I believe the opposite is true: that nasty is nice on the campaign trail, that it’s cool to be cruel.”