HUMOR
Whale Love In The Time Of Piracy
A Maine pirate’s tale
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A pirate is this:
“A sea-thief, one who without authority and by violence interferes with the property of another upon the sea…”
One time, I was kayaking in Branch Pond, a big pond in Maine, and I discovered if I parked my kayak in the water 200 yards from the old grist mill and sang like a whale, my song echoed majestically off the mill, sending my voice booming over the entire pond, and beyond, filling all the world with a sense of my great worth.
So, I parked my kayak 200 yards from the mill and began to sing.
Again, this was Maine, so it wasn’t actually 200 yards. It was 200 yads.
Yes, y-a-d-s, yads.
Here’s another Maine pronunciation.
What do you call a chicken when it’s reduced to a hockey puck of meat?
Patty.
Say it aloud: “chicken patty.”
If you said that to Mainers, they’d picture a compressed disk of chicken. They’d also picture chickens having a party.
They’d imagine a farmer marching into the chicken barn, seeing the chickens dancing, then saying, “You friggin chickens having a patty?”
One day, I will write a book full of thousands of words that help flatlanders speak with a Maine accent.
One other day, I’ll write a different book called, simply, “F-Word.” It’ll be a coffee-table book packed with photographs of people on the cusp of saying the F-Word.
It’s one of my favorite faces.
I’ll fill my book with so many people making the face: children, local politicians, kindergarten teachers, quilters, Subway…
