It's All in the Translation

Hi all - first of all, if you usually hear from me, and have not - in response to comments you left on any recent posts - I apologize.  My e-mail has been all wonky again and returned ALL of them to me as undeliverable, and I have no idea why.  It has to be something on their end, because I double-checked all of the addresses.  Sigh.

In any event, I got a charge out the comments people made, and the private e-mail messages I got regarding my Friday Letters post and the term "nebshit."  I tend to forget that it's a regionalism, from Western Pennsylvania and the area where I spent most of my growing up years (Wheeling, WV, about 40 minutes from Pittsburgh).  It describes someone who is always nosing into others' business, aka being "nebby" or a "neb-nose."  Which you probably got from the context.

I will admit that it's one of my fave words, because it so accurately describes the person being talked to or described.  It's also one of the classic words in Western Pennsylvania English (from Wikipedia):

Western Pennsylvania English, known more narrowly as Pittsburgh English or popularly as Pittsburghese, is a dialect of American English native primarily to the western half of Pennsylvania, centered on the city of Pittsburgh, but potentially appearing as far north as Erie County and Limestone, New York (north of Bradford), as far east as Sunbury, Pennsylvania, as far west as Youngstown, Ohio, and as far south as Clarksburg, West Virginia.

One of the things we never said/did (maybe because we moved around a lot, who knows), was call bologna "jumbo" as in, "Would you like a jumbo sandwich for lunch?"  The Tim's sister Kathy went to college in Cleveland, and when she said to her roomate that she was going to fix herself a "jumbo and ketchup sandwich," her roommate said, "That's not elephant meat, RIGHT?"  Which still makes me laugh to this day.  My mother did however, call rubber bands "gumbands." 

I love this kind of thing - regional words and phrases.  "Yinz" is a real fave as well - it's the plural version of "you."  And the Pittsburgh Steelers are often called the "Stillers." 

But my all time fave - maybe because as a kid it was considered the epitome of impolite - is "jagoff."  That's someone who can be a variety of things, a jerk, an a**hole, really stupid, or just annoying. 

I guess you could say that one of the worst things that could happen would be if yinz had a nebshit neighbor, who never shared a jumbo sandwich at a Stillers game - what a jagoff, right???

There's a million of them, everywhere.  And I love finding out about them!  I think it's sad that so many local expressions are being lost, because people move around a lot, or don't want to seem to be/sound uneducated.  I get it, but I also think we lose a lot of what makes it interesting to go from one place to another and meet people.

Words to live by. :-)