Cold and Comfort
From Gazette editions at the turn of the year 1935:
Richard L. Pease of Oak Bluffs opened the ice harvest season at Crystal Lake, harvesting ice eight inches or better in thickness and of a fine quality. Granted a freezing temperature, or anything approaching it for a few days, Mr. Pease expected to fill all available space in his icehouses.
Chilmark and Gay Head opened their scallop beds yesterday, although the opening of the season was not an altogether unqualified success due to heavy ice in Quitsa Pond and inshore in other places. The Chilmark set is estimated as being rather light, while that of Gay Head is believed to provide eight to ten days’ fishing for all licensed boats. The size of these pond scallops, however, is unusually large, opening more than a gallon to the bushel. The opening price was $3.50 a gallon.
A new use for Christmas wreaths has been discovered, but not by humans. Spurred to extra industry in their effort to secure food while the ground is swathed in snow, the chickadees have put their merry little heads together and decided to take a chance at those strange round green objects which they noticed appearing on every doorway a couple of weeks ago. With that intelligence that characterizes these friendly little birds, the chickadees which first discovered the manna contained in the wreaths in the way of red berries, the gray waxy fruit of the bayberry and even the pine cones, decided to make a survey of all the garlands in their neighborhood. One of them investigated the circle of green on the Gazette door yesterday morning.
Meeting in the Highland Hose House last week, the Oak Bluffs Fishermen’s Association framed a petition to be presented to the voters for consideration at the next annual meeting, asking the town to appropriate a sum to be used in conjunction with state funds to construct an opening from Sengekontacket Pond to the Sound.
The plan as drawn revives the previous agitation for a thirty foot opening, with the construction of jetties and a bridge across the state road. Purposes of sanitation and the improvement of the shellfish beds were cited.
The association also decided to ask that the sum allotted to the fish warden be increased from $135 to $700 a year, the extra cost to be met by raising the price of shellfish permits from $2 to $5.
Dr. Hans Kurath, who has made extensive studies of the speech of different New Englanders, says that it will not be long now before all New Englanders talk alike, and not only that, but like all the rest of the United States. It would be interesting to know how local idioms and mannerisms of speech began in the first place. Does the precise and lofty enunciation of Harvard and Boston derive from a little clique of poseurs in the old days who tried to speak more nicely than anyone else? And were the phrases of the coastal towns, together with their inflection, dredged up from the sea?
We do not know. And now that the radio and the talking movies and the shuttling of motor cars are uniting us all upon one plateau of undifferentiated language, the old tendency to provincial dialect is beginning to be prized instead of scorned. We are sorry to part with that which used to be, for the most part, vulgarism; and we have no idea how to come by it again. If you do not have local color, there is no way you can synthetize it.
Dr. Kurath says the twang of the coast will be the last of the local accents of New England to disappear. One reason for this, no doubt, is that the colorful expressions have a greater survival value. However they originated, they have force, meaning, niceties of inflection, which have enriched the language. Probably not all the accents will go; certainly most of the expressions themselves will be passed along to the generality of Americans who have done nothing to earn them.
Be of Good Cheer
The day is cold and damp and drear,
As entering the glad New Year
The dark and heavy clouds hang low,
To threaten sharper cold and snow.
But may the restless soul know peace,
As daylight hours now increase.
And may sad souls arise and sing;
Henceforth ‘tis all downhill to spring!
Compiled by Cynthia Meisner
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