TRAVELS WITH THE NUMBERS PEOPLE

Typical family conversation from the road trip up to Canada for my aunt R's 80th birthday:

"What's our room number?"
"315."
"That's not as good as 314."
"Or 357."
"But it does have the whole odd numbers thing going for it, like your old work extension was 357 and my mobile phone extension is the first four odd integers out of order."
"Does anyone remember R's number? We should call."
"It's the old Dormline prefix, which is a perfect square, plus equilateral triangle, plus right angle. 225-6090."
"And her apartment?"
"There's one James Bond. 1007."
"Damn. we should have looked at the odometer a bit earlier. It just passed 161616."
"Do we have a plan for how we're getting to the bridge?"
"We're taking the Route 12 shortcut."
"Route 12 isn't a shortcut."
"Yes it is. It's the hypotenuse."
"There is no hypotenuse. It's isosceles."
"Scalene, actually."
"Once you take the lower speed limit into account it is definitely not the hypotenuse."

And so on. What does normal families' car talk sound like?
. . . posted by Diana 5/12/2005 02:07:00 PM

Friday, May 06, 2005

My supervisor did some of his critical early work on the Finland-Swedish dialect (all right, I hear you, language) spoken in his home village in Western Finland. Over the years, I have been heard to remark snottily that if my home village had a language, I'd be forgetting it as fast as possible. Confident in the belief that back in Bedford we didn't have a special language of any kind.

But, as the household pet works diligently on growing an opposable thumb, it turns out we Bedford people have been working diligently on developing an intensified variety of Boston English through a kind of slambook online genre. I give you bedfordite.com. I don't pretend to understand all of it, though I recognize many of the names of teachers, juvenile delinquents, actors in the Bedford Murder, etc. The best period so far is about 1500 posts back when my brother and his friends were writing still-intelligible things like:

- Bedfordite Dictionary: keepin' busy (phrase): wicked townie way to say you are working and not in any immediate trouble with the law: "So, kid, you keepin' busy?"

- Petty-bourgeois college toolbags should remember that the working class can always drop a revolution on your candy asses.

- Don't bash the hardworking college students. We work hard so we can get out of this town.

- You must be part of the New Bedford. Don't be late for sensitivity training.

- I saw: a new and terrible suburban revolution. Mullets and Members Only jackets rampaging thru town grabbing every MILF in an SUV and dishing out The People's Revenge! Gonna be sweet.

- How Bedford works: If you went to BHS in the 70s or early 80s, you are automatically a legend, because that's when BHS rocked. If you went to BHS between the mid 80s and early 90s, you still rock; it just wasn't as crazy as the 70s. If you entered BHS in the 90s, then you have no clue about the legends.

This was also the era when the vote to remove a post was labeled "Kid, that was harsh." I forget what the positive vote was labeled.

submitted by: automatically a legend (unregistered)
. . . posted by Diana 5/6/2005 06:33:00 AM

July 2002, August 2002, September 2002
April 2002, May 2002, June 2002
January 2002, February 2002, March 2002
October 2001, November 2001, December 2001
July 2001, August 2001, September 2001
April 2001, May 2001, June 2001
January 2001, February 2001, March 2001
October 2000, November 2000, December 2000
July 2000, August 2000, September 2000
May 2000, June 2000