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Boston English

By adamg - 1/13/23 - 12:29 pm

Ellen Fleming is a reporter at WWLP in Springfield, where most people don't have a Boston accent, but she grew in Braintree, daughter of a couple of Dot rats, and used to work at Chronicle on Channel 5 here. So the other day, she was doing a report from Beacon Hill: Read more.

By adamg - 6/2/22 - 12:00 pm

Nicholas Agri reports:

Doing the freedom trail with my sons school, listening to the guides telling tourists “there’s a bubblah over there, you know what a bubblah is?”

By adamg - 12/10/21 - 10:01 am

Boston Public Works posted photos of one of its curb-cleaning hokeys hard at work in Roslindale this morning. Read more.

By adamg - 6/6/21 - 10:56 am
Mary McCann with Dorchester Gas Tank birthday cake

Mary McCann lives in Arlington, but is originally from Dorchester's Neponset section. When she flew down to Florida for her birthday this weekend, daughter Maureen wanted to make her feel right at home.

By adamg - 4/2/21 - 1:04 pm
License plate reading WKDPSSA

Guy was tooling around the South End today in a pickup with Georgia plates sending a message only Bostonians would get.

By adamg - 3/28/21 - 1:36 pm

Jillian Domenici reports on an incident this morning that shows one parenting advantage of raising a kid with a decided Boston accent: Read more.

By adamg - 11/28/20 - 12:40 pm

Sure, sure, Boston English has different pronunciations and vocabulary than English as it is spoken elsewhere, but it also has some unique grammar as well.

A few years back (but just now reaching us here in the UHub cave high up on a ridge on the Roslindale/Hyde Park frontier), the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project took a detailed, scholarly look at our unique negative positives, such as "So don't I!" Read more.

By adamg - 10/12/20 - 2:47 pm
Two SNL skits with similar themes, characters

Ari Ofsevit noticed certain similarities between this past Saturday's Bill Burr Boston skit on Saturday Night Live and the 2016 Casey Affleck Boston skit on the show - in particular, the guy in the hi-viz jacket who, just like four years ago, winds up getting shoved into some shelving.

Not everybody was pleased. Read more.

By adamg - 3/12/20 - 10:03 pm

Introducing: Boston Hand Sanitizer

By adamg - 12/13/19 - 1:51 pm
Car with a license plate that reads MY CAH

Spotted this morning outside the West Roxbury Brueggahs.

By adamg - 12/5/19 - 12:03 pm

Contestant on "The Price is Right" is from Massachusetts. "I bet you have a wicked cool prize for her," Drew Carey said. "Wicked awesome," Johnny the Offscreen Announcer replied, trying his hardest to sound like a Townie or something.

By adamg - 9/2/19 - 3:04 pm
By adamg - 8/18/19 - 7:45 pm
By adamg - 11/1/18 - 9:50 pm

Be a Masshole

Great Massachusetts political ad in 2018 or greatest Massachusetts political ad in 2018? Bonus: Videoed at West Roxbury's Porter Cafe. Language is NSFW and NSFYankeesFans.

By adamg - 10/25/18 - 4:43 pm

LA Newscasters Use Terrible Boston Accents for World Series

LA TV anchors and reporters buttress the theory that almost nobody westa Worcester can properly do a Boston accent.

By adamg - 6/27/18 - 10:04 am

From "The Answer Guys," Middlesex News, 10/31/93.

The conversation turned, as it so often does in the newsroom, to food. There was Jim eating a sandwich he'd just bought from Sub-Way. Jim, a native Pennsylvanian, casually dropped that where he came from, what he was eating was a hoagie. Other reporters jumped in, in the sort of conversation everybody has surely had at one time or another: how many different names are there for this kind of sandwich? And we quickly exhausted all the possibilities: grinder, sub, hero and, of course, hoagie.

By adamg - 1/29/18 - 11:23 am

The Associated Press sent a story out over the wire about Dana White, a guy from Southie who has gotten rich arranging fights involving people in a cage trying to beat each other up. It's the ultimate success story, but AP's Dan Gelston needs to be put in a cage himself with a guide to Boston English, because he keeps calling White "a Southie." Read more.

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