Education: Defense of Brooklyn

Harry R. Levine, Brooklyn schoolteacher, is fed up with popular misconceptions about the borough tongue. Brooklynese, he admits in High Points, magazine of the New York City Board of Education, may not be the best English in the world. But a lot of it is not unique to Brooklyn.

Suppose, says Teacher Levine, that a lot of Brooklynites do say lawr, sawr, drawring, Jerly, Aurgurst and ersters. As far back as 1919, says Levine, a certain Professor Krapp showed in a learned work that New Englanders do pretty much the same thing with r’s. They say winder for window, Banner for Hannah, piazzer, Noar, chawrk and dawrg, James Russell Lowell is another case in point: “A mournful providence fashioned us holler,” wrote the poet, “on purpose that we might our principles swaller.”

“Pseudo-intellectuals,” says Levine bitingly, “who feel that they have identified themselves with Oxonians when they include eyether [in] their otherwise humdrum speech pattern are generally among those who condescendingly mimic these allegedly Brooklyn cockneyisms. How horrified they would be to learn that in England itself, their adopted home, educated speakers are guilty of the same barbarisms.” Swallering is quite common among Britons, and even the best people refer to the Indiar Office. But, says Brooklyn’s Levine, “it is not considered bad form in England.”