Some of my favorite Yorkisms
One interesting side benefit of the “Ask Joan” feature is that even people who I’ve known for ages are starting to ask me questions about life in York County, which hadn’t really happened before. But another neat thing is that I’ve been introduced, through it, to tons of people who I didn’t already know and who’d never read this blog before.
Sometimes, these new readers have questions about things we’ve mentioned before, but haven’t talked about for a long time. Most popular in that category? Yorkisms. So, in honor of some of my newer readers – hi, guys! – I thought I mise-well round up some of the most popular or prominent Yorkisms that we’ve talked about on Only in York County from 2007 to present.
As a brief preface, a Yorkism is not something that’s ONLY said in York County. It’s something that is said frequently or by a lot of people in the area, though, maybe at a higher concentration than it might be said elsewhere. A lot of our best Yorkisms are more accurately “Pennsylvania Dutch-isms,” but that doesn’t have quite as nice a ring to it.
There’s the way we switch “leave” and “let”. Then you have our tendency to do things “quick”, regardless of their speed, and “once”, regardless of the number of times involved.
Our baseball skills must be well-developed, because we “pitch” anything we’re done with. And our golf skills are also sharp, because we’ve got a lot of “Ts” in acrosst and cousint and wunst.
The waitresses take your drink orders awhile when you enter a restaurant. We’re careful when going out to breakfast in the winter, when the roads are slippy. And when you order, dressing isn’t just for your salad, and filling isn’t just used to describe a whole plate full! We also eat dippy eggs and butter bread. When our milk is empty, it’s all. We follow a receipt when cooking (actually, we usually don’t!). And if we’re busy in the kitchen, we sure hope the kids don’t get rutchy!.
Here in York County, we know that Hamlet was wrong – “to be” isn’t even an option when the laundry needs done or the car needs washed. And no matter whatfer blogs you’re reading, you can’t miss my second-ever post.
(Also, you can read all my “Yorkisms” posts on the neat things we say here.)
