Dem Were Da Days

For more than a century, residents of New York City's borough of Brooklyn have been bunking into friends over on Toidy-Toid or Eighty-Foist streets or udder pernts around the place. Whether they ogled da goils, hersted da flag or simply berled in the noonday sun, they absolutely moidered the King's English. The "vulgar speech" that H.L. Mencken denounced in The American Language was long the despair of philologists, as well as a rich source of argot and gag lines for stand-up comics. But now Brooklynese seems to have just about gone the way of dem Bums, as the old Brooklyn Dodgers were known.

So says Francis Griffith, 68, a retired professor of educational administration at Long Island's Hofstra University, who has made a hobby of studying the format of Brooklynese for some four decades. Says Griffith, the holder of a doctoral degree in speech education from Columbia University: "Brooklynites have all but lost their special dialect, the badge of their tribe."

Joisey for Jersey. The origins of Brooklynese are controversial. It has many characteristics, but its hallmark is the pronunciation of the diphthong er as if it were oi (like Joisey for Jersey) and vice versa. Some linguists believe that Brooklynese stems from German and Yiddish. Griffith argues forcefully that it is rooted in Gaelic. He notes that the dialect appeared after a wave of Irish immigrants settled in Brooklyn in the late 19th century. Moreover, Griffith finds that the trademark Brooklyn diphthong oi also appears in many Gaelic words; taoiseach (leader) and barbaroi (barbarians), for example. He also points out that the th sound is absent in both Gaelic and Brooklynese, in which it becomes a hard / or d (as in da dame wid tin legs). Some classic Brooklyn expressions, he adds, come directly from the Gaelic: whudda card (joker) is a corruption of caird (an itinerant tramp); put da kibosh on it (put an end to it) comes from caip baish, or cap of death, a facecloth that inhabitants of southwest Ireland placed over a corpse.

These manglings of Gaelic were once the common language of Brooklyn cabbies, policemen and longshoremen --not to mention baseball fans. One linguistically memorable day at Ebbets Field in the 1930s, when Dodger Pitcher Waite Hoyt was hit by a ball, a spectator jumped up on the bleachers and shouted out, "Hurt is hoyt!" Over the years, as they grew more prosperous, New York's Irish scattered into the affluent suburbs. Blacks and Puerto Ricans have all but taken over such areas as Williamsburg (formerly Williamsboig) and Greenpoint (Greenpernt) in northern Brooklyn, where Brooklynese was born. At the same time, generations of Brooklyn schoolteachers struggled more or less successfully to hammer normal English into their pupils' heads.

Even Griffith, who spent many years as a Brooklyn teacher, once placed a sign above his blackboard admonishing: "There's no joy in Jersey." But Griffith takes no pride in having helped put the kibosh on the dialect. "Brooklynese had a bluntness and homeliness," he says. "There is a real joy in variety. Now we're becoming phonetically homogeneous." And that, as they used to say in Brooklyn, is for da boids.

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