I shared an office at one point with a gentleman just a little older than me, who had grown up in Chelmsford and Lowell, MA and gone to Fitchburg State. This is very much the territory of my father's family, and my father's second wife is still alive, living in Nabnasset.
One of the programs at the hospital included the place of birth of the patient. Paranoid patients would sometimes not want to tell us, wondering what terrible use were were going to put that information to. While making other demographic entries in the program I hit one puzzling entry that in a moment caused me to smile, knowing I would keep this one for years.
"Fred. Fred. Come over here. You have to see this." There under place of birth was the entry Wusta. A wonderful New England accent moment.
3 comments:
I live in the original Chelmsford, in Essex England.
One of our neighbouring towns is Billericay, which we pronounce Billericky.
But how do Americans pronounce one of the towns near Chelmsford MA called
Billerica? It must have been named after the Essex town but I wonder how they said
it in 1650.
We say it Bill-RIH-kah now. New England had lots of towns named after East Anglian ones, because there was a heavy concentration of puritans there. I suspect the best you could do on the vowels of those places would be to listen to the Original Pronunciation of Shakespeare, who would have been only a few decades before the founding of those places. I wrote about it four weeks ago https://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2024/04/received-pronunciation-vs-original.html If you like this sort of thing, David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed has almost a cult following here, even though it came out in the 1980s. He provides remarkable evidence for the cultural persistence of the 1625-1640 East Anglian founding of New England, the 1640-1660 Wessex founding of Virginia and the coastal Carolinas, the 1660-1700 West Midlands origins of the Mid-Atlantic (Quaker) states, and the 1710-1770 Scots-Irish/English Borderers founding of Appalachia and the Merrimack Valley in New England. Housing, marriage and family customs, attitudes toward death, food ways, everything.
You might also like an older post I stole "The 15-Real Nations of Great Britain" from someone at the English site "Ship of Fools" two decades ago. https://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2007/01/field-guide-to-15-real-nations-of.html
Just looked up the Wiki entry for Billericay. There are various explanations for the name including the possibility that it comes from Billers, an old name for watercress. This plant was grown in Billericay and apparently there are two other Billericas in England, both associated with watercress.
This might be another example of the US retaining the older name and pronunciation, but maybe the simplest explanation is that the original was pronounced Billerrickay but spelled Billerica. This, of course, was in the days when there were no prescribed spellings.
In the US the name eventually was spoken the way it was spelled. In England Rickay became Ricky because of language drift. (We know that people try to use as little effort as possible to pronounce familiar words.)
I suppose we will ever know unless we find an old play or poem where the author has rhymed Billericay with something.
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