Word: griffith
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Professor Francis Griffith is wrong...
...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...
...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...
...quiet Sunday morning in early August when Viet Nam Veteran John Gabron, 22, went on his last patrol. Wearing an Army helmet liner and field jacket and carrying a telescopic rifle, he climbed a sagebrush-covered hill in Los Angeles' Griffith Park. When two park rangers approached in a pickup truck, Gabron captured them at rifle point. As one of the rangers told it later, Gabron explained that "he had lived by the gun and wanted...