Tuesday, May 23, 2006

New words

It's about time for me to do another update of the glossary - maybe over the long weekend (but only if it rains again!).

These were sent in by CB from Dexter, Maine:
  • huck - To throw: "Quit huckin' rocks at youah sistah!"
  • skidder - (skiddah) A heavy, four-wheel tractor used to haul logs, especially over rugged terrain. A specialized type with claws for picking up bundles of logs is known as a "grapple-skiddah". Skiddahs make and use "Skiddah-trails" and are owned and operated by members of the "skiddah-crowd" and often do double-duty as the ultimate form of tow truck for when a Mainah goes muddin' and gets in a real gaum: "We buried her so deep that we had to get a skiddah to yahd her out."
  • Voc Boy - A vocational school student. The term "Voc Boy" is used to identify a class of student at a high school, much like the terms "Jock", "Prep", "Nerd", and "Druggy" are used to identify their respective classes of students; with the main criteria being that they are male and they attend vocational school learning things like carpentry, truck drivin' or automotive mechanics, as opposed to more conventional academic studies such as readin', writin' an' 'rithmetic.
  • flatlander - (flatlandah) A general term to describe someone not from Maine; someone from away; an outta-state-ah.
  • Maine State Bird - mosquito.

3 comments:

Michelle Souliere said...

A note on another type of skiddah from the heyday of the late 1980s at Deering High in Portland: a lot of the heavy metal kids and voc kids were called "skids," the art and drama club crowd were called "granolas."

Michelle Souliere said...

Well here's a weird coincidence for you. Less than a week after my comment, the Double-Tongued word of the day was "skid" --

skid

n. a disreputable or unfashionable young person. Said to be a
contraction of street kid, but there’s little substantiation for
this. There is some evidence that this term is most common in Canada.

Full entry:

http://www.dtww.org/index.php/dictionary/skid/

Categories:

Youth: http://dtww.org/index.php/dictionary/newcats/C258/
Derogatory: http://dtww.org/index.php/dictionary/newcats/C41/
Slang: http://dtww.org/index.php/dictionary/newcats/C36/

Citations and other information are available at the Double-Tongued
Dictionary web site.

Anonymous said...

Don't forget "PFA" -- people from away. As in, "Don't mind him, he's a PFA and don't know no better."