BY P.S. NOLF
1. The Pittsburgh Chain Shift uniquely identifies Southwestern Pennsylvania. Neither tectonic nor glacial, it is a linguistic distinction. As the nineteenth century Scotch-Irish, English, and Germans searched for homes in the Allegheny mountains, the settlers mingled their dialects and lost a vowel. Through monophthongization, the vowels /a/ and /ɔ/ merged to /aw/. “Naughty doll Don caught in his cot in the knotty hall at dawn” is all internal rhyme.
2. When I was a child, we lived in the family home in Putneyville, Pennsylvania. Nestled between two forested ridges, forty residences clustered along the creek, its waters flowing to Pittsburgh. Clans of cousins played endless baseball games in the summer and crack-the-whip skating on the frozen mill race in the winter. Nobody remembered who owned the coal rights in their backyards. We mazed at the granite tombstones filled with a century of Nolfs, Putneys, and Schreckengosts. Until we rode the schoolbus, we never knew there was a Catholic graveyard of Bukoskis, Rossis, and Hlavics in the next town.
3. “I bet I drop six of them when I get over there” said the deputy on September 10, 1897. That day the police shot nineteen unarmed Polish and Lithuanian strikers at the coal mine in Lattimer, Pennslyvania. Two years later, John Mitchell, President of United Mine Workers of America, pleaded, “The coal you dig isn’t Slavish or Polish, or Irish coal. It’s just coal.”
4. When I was ten, my family moved to the Philadelphia area. We lived in a three-bedroom, rose and gray stone cottage, the former servant quarters to a mansion owned by a founding family of the city. Mrs. S. invited my sister and me for visits. We learned to conjugate the irregular French verbs of être (to be), avoir (to have) and pouvoir (to be able). I developed a taste for the bittersweet lemon and quinine of the tonic she served us. The gin came later.
5. Pittsburghese is commonly considered the second ugliest accent in the United States. Linguistic studies indicate women tend to care more about the social stigma attached to regional dialects and transition to standard pronunciations during formal discourse. Men are more likely to celebrate their dialect with T-shirts: “Yinz are a buncha jag-offs.”
6. Through the years, I practiced saying “water” for “warter” and “wash” for “warsh.” I no longer pronounced hill with the drawn out lilting /l / of the Appalachians. I swallowed “yu’uns” and purged the Scotch “slippy,” “redd up,” and “nebby.” I accumulated college degrees, collected obscure words like Shaker baskets, and wrote in syntax as elaborate as fraktur manuscripts. I was still trapped by the Caught-Cot Merger. I never found my lost vowel.
7. I still dream of Putneyville in the rain. Basements fill with water. The height of the Mahoning leaps from inches to yards to Biblical rods. The house backs up to a steep hill. I see flickering white from the tails of deer followed by the red plaid-clad hunter crossing the ridgeline. Water keep rising, rising, rising. I struggle to climb that hill, grasping stunted pine and spruce. Mud keeps sucking me down to the rushing brown water, stained orange and silver with runoff from long abandoned coal mines.
P. S. Nolf writes articles about horses, humor, and history for online and national journals such as Equus. She is currently working on a narrative nonfiction book Raising Rough Riders in the White House: Archie and Quentin Roosevelt and their Pony Algonquin. In her spare time, she is working on a MFA at Lindenwood University.