Balmur is a blue-collar city and during Mencken's day was dominated by three major industries; steel and iron forging, the Port and railroads and spice production. McCormick and Company sat right across from the Pier One Pratt Street where the Great White Fleet (bananas and spices, not rich tourists) docked and the whole of downtown was filled with the smell of spices when they were grinding.
The language is Southern, but nowhere near as slow as most. You seldom find "Ts" inside a word but do use it at the end and "the" is never "Thee". Folk actually sing "Maryland my Maryland" and there it has three sylables, "Mar-ri-land my Mar-ri-land". In every other instance it reduces to Marlyn.
The city was very much divided into ethnic neighborhood but everyone worked together and there was not much segregation in schools, churches or stores. Yiddish was very prominent and so work like mensch were in everyones lexicon. The giggest ethnic groupings were the Jews, Poles, Germans(During WWI Baltimore changed almost all the German named streets including Pulaski. When it was pointed out by Mencken that Pulaski was a Pole, not German, they changed all the names back to the original).
I've seen it claimed that H.L. went to Obrycki's but that's not likely since they didn't open until 1944.
AbE
I listened to the two samples of dialect that Schraf supplied but I need to warn you that neither are Baltimore accents. In fact they would stand out like a sore thumb even as recently as the '50's.
Howard County is most certainly not Baltimore and the Eastern Shore, at the time of Mencken was like a foriegn country. In particular, the first example is totally unlike the dialect of the Eastern Shore from before the Bay Bridge.
This message has been edited by jar, 06-07-2005 12:37 PM
Aslan is not a Tame Lion
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