ok, before I get blasted for making stereotypes, know that I am inquiring about the stereotype.
Mainers (from what I’ve gathered) are regarded as simpletons by their Massachusettsan neighbors. In the same vein as Poles, Welsh, etc.
Simple question: do Vermonters have this same reputation? (not from Mass., but anywhere)
I’m not from the NE, but perhaps the stereotype I associate with Vermonters is ex-hippies who got teaching jobs. I don’t know how scientific these lists are, but Vermont tops the “smartest” states, see here, here, and here (probably have to click the arrow).
Isn’t the stereotype about people from Maine that they’re taciturn, not stupid?
No, Vermonters are granola-eating Birkenstock-wearing, eggheads. I’m surprised they don’t expect the cows to milk themselves after a therapy session.
Canny and taciturn, is the stereotype I’m familiar with.
Tourist: where does this road go?
Mainer: It doesn’t go nowheah, it stays right theah.
Tourist: I see there’s a fork in the road, if I want to get to (city) does it matter which fork I take?
Mainer: Not to me.
And so on, this is a tiny part of a whole routine that was related to me once upon a time. FTR, I’ve been to Maine exactly once, driving from NH to the outlet stores in the town where LL Bean is. I’m from the west coast; I once had a college professor from Maine whose accent was so pronounced that I originally thought she was an immigrant from a foreign country. But she was not taciturn at all, she was very nice.
Roddy
I thought the stereotype for Maine was the ridiculously high murder rate, ref: Murder, She Wrote, a good chunk of Stephen King’s bibliography, etc.
I live in Mass. and I do not think either Maine or Vermont has a dumb stereotype. We call people form Main “maniacs” but it’s just because it sounds cool and it’s sort of a term of endearment.
Before I moved back to Massachusetts, I never heard the stereotype of Mainers (Mainiacs?) as dumb – as noted above, taciturn, but not stupid. But the local oldies station has run a daily joke feature “Men from Maine” every day for the past 20 years or so that has folks from Maine as stupid , ignorant, loose-moraled, foul-mouthed, and dirty. Aside from them, I don’t know who’s pushing this stereotype.
It’s like the Salt Lake City stereotype of BYU co-eds as fat and dumb. I don’t know where that came from – the BYU co-eds I saw were generally gorgeous. But you can buy books of BYU coed jokes in SLC.
Stranger: Excuse me, does this road go to Portland?
Mainer: Nope, stays right here.
Stranger: Can I take this road to Portland?
Mainer: Ayup, you can, but they got plenty of roads in Portland already.
http://www.islandportpress.com/bert50.htm - Bert and I
And I agree with the other posters, there isn’t any stereotype of Mainiacs as being dumb other than sort of a generic rural vs city thing. But Boston folk would say the same thing about people in western Mass.
I’m in Vermont. So no.
I’m from Vermont originally, but left before the hippies took over. Back then it was inhabited by hard-working, taciturn, conservative individualists.
Oh, yeah, we called people from Massachusetts Massholes.
Sorry.
You have your stereotypes mixed up. Rhode Islanders are dumb.
Tourist: where does this road go?
Row Dilander: Duh?
I’m from MA and
And yeah, for Maine humor;
Judge; “Have you lived here all your life?”
Witness; “Not yet.”
Uh, not “newcomers,” but “flatlanders.”
And, as James Thurber once wrote, “All people can be divided into two groups: those who divide people into two groups and those who don’t,”
I took a trip to Vermont this Summer and that’s exactly what I saw. You could split the population into two distinct groups: hippies and 20something college kids.
I lived in MA for 13 years, and Mainers were considered a touch odd, not stupid. VT=hippies is a pretty entrenched stereotype, though, as is VT=hicks who are outnumbered by the cows.
Farmer from Vermont, talking to Farmer from Maine: What did you feed your cow when it got the colic?
Maine: Bran and molasses.
A week later…
Vermont: I fed my cow bran and molasses and it died!
Maine: So did mine.
Uhhhh…those are pretty much the same thing.
If (and that’s a big if) you’re going to divide Vermonters into two groups, it’s twenty-something ‘new age hippies/trustafarians’ and then ‘old-school’ Vermonters (salt of the earth/farmer types.)
And really, if you aren’t in Burlington or Brattleboro (and perhaps Montpelier and Bennington,) it’s like 90% the other type of Vermonter.
The rural parts of the VT can be as red-state, gun-toting, Obama-hating as you can imagine (which isn’t to say that all of the ‘old-school’ style Vermonters are like that, just that some of them are, and it surprises a lot of non-Vermonters who think everyone here is all hippe, liberal, atheist, commies.)
If you want to get the general idea of Vermont, just watch the 80’s sitcom Newhart. It is exaggerated but fairly accurate except there aren’t any real Larry, Darryl, and Darryls around as far as I ever saw but close. I made up my mind to live there when I was a was kid in Louisiana and managed to swing it in my early 20’s for over a year. It is a drop-dead gorgeous place but very odd. I never heard anyone claim that the population was dumb, just the opposite. Its neighbor, New Hampshire picks up some of those comments but that isn’t close to accurate either. If it wasn’t so cold for most of the year, Northern New England would be close to heaven on earth. Vermont life still manages to straddle several centuries worth of technology successfully and some of it does seem primitive but charming. They still have true general stores that haven’t been updated much from when they were built in the 1800’s and the landscape hasn’t changed that much over time.
You calling The Mob dumb? I’ll have mayor Buddy Cianci stop by your house and punch you in the nose!
Yeah, Mainiacs are taciturn and folksy. Vermonters are socialists! I mean, they’re almost Canadians. Notice how NH is narrow in the north (near Canada) and wide in the south (near MA). VT is the opposite. Everyone in VT is required to take classes at Bennington.