New Slang from Potsdam

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. And Martha, I’ve got a stack of cards here that you won’t believe.

Yeah? You have people sending you valentines or birthday cards?

Well, yeah, of course. I get a lot of I love you valentines.

No, no. These are word cards. These are kind of a fieldwork thing that I do when I give public speeches, right?

Oh, these are souvenirs from your trip to Potsdam, New York.

That’s right. I went to Potsdam, New York.

You had a blast.

I did a bunch of classroom lectures. I did a public talk. I talked to the listeners of North Country Public Radio.

Hi, guys. It was great. And when I was in public with these people, I gave out all these index cards and said, tell me the words that you don’t think I know, either because they’re slang and you’re young and I’m old or because they’re a regional expression or because they’re something that you use in your own family, right?

So this is when you were at State University of New York at Potsdam.

That’s right. SUNY Potsdam.

And so one of the words I wanted to talk about was crick.

Crick, like in your neck?

No, crick as in creek, C-R-E-E-K, and it’s a regional pronunciation.

What’s really interesting about it is a lot of people who don’t really know it or use it think that crick is southern, but it’s actually mostly northern.

It’s used in the northeast and New England and around the Great Lakes and along the Canadian border, kind of south of there.

But in the deep south and in the very southern parts of the United States, they don’t say crick.

Interesting.

Another one that I really liked is a slang term, bogue.

Bogue?

B-O-G-E. Can you guess what it means?

B-O-G-E.

Or B-O-A-G. I had two different spellings of it submitted.

Boag sounds biblical, and boag is like Bogart?

Yes.

It is?

It’s a cigarette.

Oh, oh, oh.

Sometimes it’s a tobacco cigarette.

Sometimes it’s something else.

Okay.

So you know about don’t Bogart that, right?

Sure.

It means don’t smoke at all, let me have some, right?

Yeah, I’ve never been told that, but yes.

And it supposedly comes from Humphrey Bogart and his fondness for cigars, right?

Right.

And that sort of thing.

But this is a further shortening of Bogart or bogie to boag.

Huh.

Give me a boag.

Yeah, give me a bogue.

Yeah, give me a cigarette or give me a smoke of that.

Right?

Interesting.

Right?

We’ll talk about a few more of these cards.

I’ll put the whole list on the website.

Oh, wow, really?

Yeah.

There’s 160 different terms I collected of wide variety of things.

If you’ve got some language that you think we should know and probably don’t, 877-929-9673.

Or put the whole messy thing in email to words@waywordradio.org.

You’ll make Grant a very happy man.