The Maine Accent

Ryan sent me a clip of a Boston commercial today in which a mother calls her family to "dinnah."  He got a kick out of the accent so I then referenced a Maine classic from Hammond Lumber company:

I wish I could copy an authentic Maine accent, but I just can't get it right.  Ryan had a coworker in Maine known as "Cowboy Bill" whose accent he still mimics.  (I am going to go out on a limb and guess that Bill gave himself that nickname.)  It is unbelievable how people in our hometown and the surrounding area could have such thick accents while others had, to my ear, no accent at all.  I think we fall into the latter category, but who knows.  I can detect a slight Maine accent when our dad speaks.  I say slight because his accent is minuscule in comparison to that of the man who built my parents' house and many other Mainers.  While I fell into a Maine-accent rabbit hole online, I came across the following clip of a Maine State Trooper and an enraged motorist with a Maine accent.  Our Uncle Pat, a former trooper, recently admitting to being a loyal Baking Like A Toasted Reader, so I am posting this in his honor.  (Warning:  Inappropriate language.)

One final note.  Until I started college, I was under the impression that using "wicked" as a synonym for "very" was unique to Maine.  It is the only word/phrase from the Bangor Daily News* article "Everybody's heard about the (Maine) words" that I regularly use.  My mother is from Western Massachusetts and my father's parents grew up in Boston, so I have never heard a family member utter "Ayuh."  In fact, only a few items on the list ring a bell.  My nana uses "cunning" to mean cute, it is very possible that I have said "Jeezum crow" at some point in my life, and my dad says "numb" in place of stupid.  He also favors the phrase "numbnuts," as in, "Did that numbnuts just drive over my lawn?"  He's a colorful guy.

*I cannot think about the Bangor Daily News without hearing my Uncle Dave practice answering their phone, emphasizing a different word in the paper name each time:  "Bangor Daily News. . . .  Good morning, Bangor Daily News. . . .   Good afternoon, Bangor Daily News."  We are a simple family.