Behavior: Dem Were Da Days

For more than a century, residents of New York City's borough of Brooklyn have been bunking into friends over on Toidy-Toid or Eighty-Foist streets or udder pernts around the place. Whether they ogled da goils, hersted da flag or simply berled in the noonday sun, they absolutely moidered the King's English. The "vulgar speech" that H.L. Mencken denounced in The American Language was long the despair of philologists, as well as a rich source of argot and gag lines for stand-up comics. But now Brooklynese seems to have just about gone the way...

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