The first US president to be born in a hospital was Kennedy in 1917. .
Correction - Google has proven me wrong. it was Jimmy Carter in 1924 .
I’m not sure that’s right. The Kennedy National Historic Site in Brookline, Massachusetts, is described as Kennedy’s birthplace. It’s the family’s home, not a hospital.
https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/presidents/john_f_kennedy_birthplace.html
ETA: Ninjafied.
Was walking through downtown Newburyport, Massachusetts yesterday and saw two stores that had signs reading
YEAT
I had to ask one of the clerks about it, and she directed me to a sheet they had printed out explaining the meaning to out-of-towners. This isn’t it, but it explains the word:
Evidently there’s a game show on Newburyport radio “Yeat! Yeat! Don’t tell me”, a local take on PBS’ “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”
And it has nothing to do with the rapper Yeat, who I hadn’t even heard of until I started looking this up.
Funny thing is, I saw his in two different places yesterday, for what I swear is the first time. But one store I visited claimed that they’ve had these signs up for more than four years.
Yeat!
Lots of local areas, friend groups, families or hobbyists have similar, usually single syllable, nonsense words that have various meanings according to context. I wonder if there is a term for this phenomenon.
My ex-wife and I have one. My friends in my freshman dorm had “dorch” and my college deadhead friends had “meegs”. I keep remembering them. My childhood friends had “froyd” for a while.
The Tom Wolfe book The Pumphouse Gang revealed the one use by the local surfers at Windansea Beach, “meeba”. I lived half a block from the pumphouse in the late 80s which was many years later and the locals still used it to identify one another.
It took me a long time of hanging out with a guy who used “Oofdah” to understand what “Ooofdah” means.
There are lots of terms for this type of vocabulary. In folklore, it all comes under Folk Speech, and the specific terminology is determined by context (is it a regionalism? jargon?); linguistics probably has their own terms. But it’s generally just slang that’s used among a particular group, and / or a shibboleth.
Well, no wonder. You can’t get to Ooofdah through Oofdah. Totally different etymologies.
Seriously, in Norwegian it’s Uff da.
sometimes also spelled oof-da, oofda, oofala, oof-dah, oofdah, huffda, uff-da, uffda, uff-dah, ufda, ufdah, or uf daa
Paul Dickson wrote a book about such in-family coinages called “Family Words”. An interesting book. Sometimes I’m pretty sure of the origin of some of the ones they say they don’t know the origins of, but the families in the book are anonymous, so there’s no way I can tell them.
I’ve heard of the “Oofhas”/“Ooofdah”/“Uff da” /etc. thing before. My understanding is that it’s a scandinavian thing widespread among people of that background in the upper midwest. Much more widely spread than the very-restricted “Yeat”
There have been other cryptic slang single words, often of use only for a short time. Readers of MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds know about the short career of “Quoz” and weird little phrases that had a short half-life. Readers of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol know about “Walker” (which, to my delight, was actually retained in at least two movie adaptations of the story, despite the fact that hardly any viewers would have the slightest idea what it meant)
To be honest, “Yeat” is the only case of such a slang single word restricted to a single city that I’ve heard of. I don’t count local terminology for something or a place that only locals know about – that’s understandable – but only words that inhabitants of a locality choose to express some more general profanity or emotion. Possible the Dopers can suggest others.
I’m not a speaker, but I would guess that Boontling, would be a language with words that meet your criteria.
Pedant here. It’s Uff da!, and sometimes Uff da fay!. It is considered a bit old-fashioned now but was very common here in Minnesota, along with the Ole and Lena jokes.
Idaho is not the name of a tribe. It was submitted by a mining company executive at the behest of the Colorado legislature when they were seeking statehood and needed a name for themselves and wanted something that sounded Indian. Apparently when they found out it was totally fabricated they decided to go for a Spanish option but it was later used for another territory.
I don’t think I’ve heard it out of the context of Scand-American humor.
Somebody modernized the Isetta!
Their promotional video leaves a bit to be desired, though. “You’ve never seen anything quite like it before”? Hello? Isetta?
Fascinating! So the name Idaho itself is basically the creation of a scam artist.
That reminds me of the Australian paperback line Phantom Books. Every cover read, “An Original Mystery - Not a Reprint.” Every title was a reprint of an American paperback, sometimes down to the cover art and back cover blurb.
I though they might have an out if the American editions were paperback originals, but at least one on that page, Untidy Murder by Frances & Richard Lockridge, had a previous hardcover edition.
A single strand of spaghetti is spaghetto.
My Scandinavian wife let go with a breathy Uff Da during labor, and the Jewish lady who was the OB-GYN asked “What is this uff da?”
“It’s Oy Vey.”
“Oh, okay. Big Uff Da.”
Exactly so.
Today I came across the story of the first false confession in the U.S.A. 