Fugehdaboudit!
By Burkhard Bilger
Excerpted from Brooklyn, A State of Mind by Michael W. Robbins and Wendy Palitz
Copyright © 2001 by Michael W. Robbins and Wendy Palitz
Used by permission of Workman Publishing Co., Inc., New York
All Rights Reserved
The Brooklyn Accent
Fugehdaboudit!
By Burkhard Bilger
That cramped space, and the mass of immigrants within it, has turned New York into a linguistic witch’s cauldron. In the late 1600s, Dutch and Belgian settlers, forced to speak their conquerors’ English, probably gave Brooklynese its “muddas and faddas,” “deses and doses” - though some language experts attribute the d/th swap to the Germans and Irish. After the Revolutionary War, Yankees who relocated from New England encouraged Brooklynites to drop the “r’s” from the ends of words, yielding nuggets like “watuh” and “drivuh.” Then in the 1850s Irish immigrants continued the vendetta against “th” sounds. In their mouths, “think” became “tink” and “thumb” became “tumb.” Over time, the “oi” sound in the middle of words became similarly endangered, giving us “liar” for “lawyer.”
Finally, Southern settlers gathered up all those orphaned “oi’s” and found new homes form them in words like “noive” (nerve) and “woim” (worm.
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