Having grown up on the coast of Maine, I was surprised at your rendition of “Nor’easter” for Northeaster (Jan. 5)!
My grandfather was a lobsterman and my uncle owned the local lobster pound. We had more than one sea captain in the family and I never heard any of them call a Northeast storm a “Nor’easter.”
The only place that I have heard anything close to this was on some Hollywood movie in which someone was trying to sound like a Mainer. So I did some investigation and got to the truth of the matter.
Please, take the following information into consideration from an authority on the subject from the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine.
According to “Maine Lingo,” by John Gould, offered to me by Brent Hall, library director at the academy’s Nutting Memorial Library, Northeast is correctly “pronounced know-theast, with the ‘th’ sound of those, instead of the ‘th’ of thing. The four quarter points in boxing the Maine compass are spoken thus: know-theast, sow-theast, sow-west and nor-west. Northing is pronounced knowth-ing, and southing is sow-thing. The dictionary-sanctioned nor-east and nor-easter are absolutely in error and shouldn’t be spoken anywhere.
“The reasons for these pronunciations go back to the days when vocal commands from a vessel’s quarterdeck had to be instantly and unquestionably understood by men working the ship. Nor-east and nor-west sounded too much alike for shipboard clarity.”
My real concern is that we will lose our distinction as New Englanders and become homogenized into nothingness.
Randi Tolman, Lewiston
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