I’d just come from Tasha’s delivery of a healthy baby boy, which despite Carline’s dire warnings, had gone beautifully. I was at the Wellfleet Marketplace, where the prices were high and the food was great. Thomas Porter, A Witty Combat, 1663), the explosion of wicked as an adverb is a late 20th-century phenomenon. But while there are a handful of examples dating back to the Middle Ages (Yesterday was. It seems to have echoes of the Salem witch trials, and the pronounced second syllable is an archaism it shares with words like blessed or learned (as opposed to other modifiers, like finished or warmed). The New Partridge Dictionary of American Slang labels wicked as “ rare instance of late C20 American slang that has stayed regional.”Īs with other terms associated with New England, wicked feels old. While this use isn’t exclusive to the Northeast, it has developed a strong association with the culture of New England, and particularly the eastern part of New England.

But New Englanders famously use it as an intensifying adverb meaning “to an extreme or impressive degree.”

2 (2017)Īs an adjective, wicked carries the meanings “vile,” “vicious,” and “of exceptional quality or degree” (as in “throws a wicked fastball”). Laura Spence-Ash, New England Review, Vol. They gulp down the cold water at the bubbler before leaving the tennis courts. as a whole and particularly in the southeastern states, followed by drinking fountain, with bubbler accounting for about 4% of the usage. According to one linguistic survey, water fountain is the most common term in the U.S. Among the most localized of these terms is bubbler meaning “drinking fountain.” Except for a part of Wisconsin and the historic downtown drinking fountains in Portland, Oregon, it seems that bubbler is unique to New England use and is by far the least frequent of its synonyms. Terms like spa for ye olde soda fountain counters, or package store for liquor store, or frappe for milkshake can make it seem like time has stood still in the northeast corner of the country. Sometimes it almost seems like the idiosyncratic words used by New Englanders are deliberately anachronistic. : a drinking fountain from which a stream of water bubbles upward Remember the ice cream soda fountain in the old general store? Where penny candy was plentiful and the homemade ice cream was rich and piled high? Where you could sit on the stoop on a hot summer’s day or night and lick the melting ice cream as it ran down the cone and onto your hand? … Of course, an ice cream emporium would be incomplete without frappes, floats, malts and shakes. Ultimately, the word came to be used for a milkshake, and when used with this meaning today, often the accent mark is dropped, giving us frappe (pronounced /frap/). This led to the past participle of the verb, frappé, to be used for an iced drink, sometimes specifically referring to a liqueur served over shaved ice. Frappe comes from the French verb frapper (pronounced /frah-pay/), which means “to hit” or “to strike” in the majority of its uses, but can also mean “to chill, to ice” when used of drinks (like chilling wine, for example). What were you expecting, ice cream? For that, you need to order a frappe (or, if you’re in Bristol, what Rhode Islanders call a “cabinet,” made with that state’s beloved coffee syrup). Order a milkshake in a burg like Braintree or Biddeford, and you might just get milk mixed with flavored syrup.

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