Translating English (Part 3)

Each region of the United States has its own dialect, idioms, and colorful phrases. Pittsburgh, and Western Pennsylvania, is no exception. Perhaps most famous in the Pittsburghese lexicography is the use of the word, “Yinz,” or you ones. It is used frequently in Western Pennsylvania to make informal inquiries or observations, as in “Yinz going to the Steelers game?”

Kennywood is an iconic amusement park, dating from the late-19th century, in the metropolitan Pittsburgh area. It is famous among locals and natives as a place of great rides, school outings and summertime fun. Yet, if you ask or tell a male in Pittsburgh “Kennywood’s open,” it has a profound effect. You are indicating that the person’s pants zipper is down. It is widely known and employed, in fact a local restaurant chain has the phrase on the men’s room door to remind patrons to check their wardrobe before exiting.

My grandmother, a long-term resident of Louisville, Kentucky, was fond of saying criticizing people by saying something was, “Lit up like Levy’s.” The reference was to Levy’s Brothers Department Store, in downtown Louisville, which had a large and bright Christmas display each year. If there were too many lights on in the house, which usually meant she considered it a waste of electricity, they she would utter the phrase. 

Baltimore in January

US Route 1 winds its way through some of the most depressed areas of Baltimore; it is a route heavy with boarded up buildings and general urban decay. The overcast day in mid-January, when I traversed the road, was an appropriate backdrop for this trip through the center of the city. Although the temperature was in the med-30s, several elderly people sat in the front of the ubiquitous row houses, seeming companionship and distraction. One man was feeding pigeons outside his house; two women sat on a stoop, speaking animatedly to one another.

Row houses along Monroe Street in central Baltimore

There were several handmade signs along the route that pointed to a general feeling of despair. In an abandoned lot, painted in purple, one sign read, “Enough is Enough.” At a liquor store, closed during my mid-morning excursion or perhaps permanently, the word “pray” was painted below the store’s damaged sign. A little further on, in another abandoned lot, trash, almost ankle deep, strewn around a hand-painted sign, optimistically proclaimed, “Every problem has a solution.”

Yet, it must not seem so to many of the residents I imagine. Orwell observed: “It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.” A drug addled or mentally ill, perhaps both, man was soliciting money from cars waiting at a light near the intersection of Monroe and Mulberry, where two of the country’s most important routes, US 1 and US 40 meet. He was wearing a grey sweatshirt with a hood and dark pants, insufficient for the windy cold day that it was. Even though he was relatively young, perhaps in his thirties, he had difficulty navigating around the cars; he looked as if he was going to fall several times and placed a hand on several of the cars waiting at the light to steady himself. An ambulance, on an emergency run, came through the intersection. The cars moved to one side to allow it to pass; the man gazed at the ambulance from the middle of road with a look of incomprehension darting across his face.

It is stunning that these scenes occur along these two great highways: one that navigates the east coast, the other runs from New Jersey to Utah down the center of the country. Despite being right along the major thoroughfares, places like Baltimore are a part of the country that many of the powerful have forgotten or, perhaps, they choose to avert their gaze. Structural poverty creates a never ending cycle of misery and despair. Often it is hidden in plain sight.