Once again, I was lost, this time in a strange city -- apparently, I was trying to drive from somewhere down south all the way to Vermont. We park the car and my companion (a guy totally unknown to me, by the way) asks a traffic cop the name of the city at which we've arrived. The policeman says to my friend, "ay, ya" and my friend says to me, and I quote this lunatic absurdity absolutely verbatim, no embroidery whatsoever, 'He says we're in ay-ya, which is West Indian for New Brunswick, New Jersey."
"West Indian for New Brunswick, New Jersey?" Goodness gracious, is that creative, or what? Another brilliant achievement of my dreamatorium.
Ay-ya sounds like something Katherine Hepburn would say. I think it's a sound that emerges from the mouth of someone whose words are mangled by Main Line lockjaw, a dialect I've been trying to imitate so that I can fool the Pennsylvania natives into thinking I was born in Bryn Mawr instead of Brooklyn. I don't think it's a sound that would be heard in New Brunswick, NJ. My wife spent some time in Rutgers, and she does not recall anyone ever saying "Ay-ya."
Posted by: Don Z. Block | December 12, 2020 at 05:08 PM