With all the talk about accents on GMG today, it’s clearly time to put forth our new Law of Life, or LOL for short. (You’ll notice we skipped our LOL last week due to all the fuss about Nemo).
This week’s LOL is based on Antoine Lavoisier’s Law of the Conservation of Mass, the same principle as our very first LOL, which was You’re more likely to gain weight if someone you know is losing weight (see the explanation here). Only in this case, Mass refers to Massachusetts and what we’re conserving is the letter R.
You natives may not notice, but people like Vickie and me, who didn’t grow up here, have discovered that whenever you take R off a word (Beer for example) you somehow feel compelled to add it to another one. So you say Peetser and Beah instead of Pizza and Beer.
But it doesn’t stop there. You guys add Rs to words even when you aren’t removing them from other words. For example, Tuner and Mayo (instead of Tuna and Mayo — although I doubt Joey mixes mayo with tuna, but that’s a topic for another post.)
It seems like you’ll jump at any chance to add an R, as if you’re feeling guilty for all those poh innocent Ahhs you’ve slaughtered during your lifetime.
So here’s the question: is there some sort of underground R accounting that only Boston area natives know about? Is there a website I can check to see what the R deficit is as of this very moment? Are you all secretly working together to help save your precious Rs from extinction — along with the great white shahk? Oops, did I just add to the deficit? Does something magical happen every time you add an R to a word where it doesn’t belong, sort of like the magic in this video?
Good Morning Gloucester 