To say that we have a colorful and rich vocabulary in Maine is an understatement. Maine is one of those states where people 'from away" can visit and not understand most of what we are talking about at any given time (see: Dooryard). But with Maine becoming one of the hottest destinations in the country, we think it might be helpful to share some Maine words and phrases so that you newbies to our state can get in the Maine groove.
We polled Mainers and asked them what words they would want to be added as an official word to the English language. Here are the top 45 choices:
45 Maine Words That Should Be Added To The Dictionary
Here are 45 Maine slang words that we think should be added to Merriam-Webster, Funk & Wagnalls, or any legit dictionary of your choice.
Things People Say That Make Mainers Roll Their Eyes
TOP SPOTS IN MAINE WITH AMAZING CUSTOMER SERVICE
In Maine, it's not hard to find businesses, restaurants, and shops with great customer service. It could be we are that way because of the many tourists that visit us. Or it just might be our stubborn Yankee roots that we like to treat people the way we want to be treated.
20 Of the Best Places in Maine to People Watch
We asked Maineers where they go to people watch. Here were the Top 20 responses.
TEHRAN – British-Cypriot author Alex Michaelides’s novel “The Maidens” has been published in Persian two months after the publication of its original English edition.
Maryam Hosseinnejad has translated the book published by Sang in Tehran.
The book illustrates that Edward Fosca is a murderer. Of this Mariana is certain. But Fosca is untouchable. A handsome and charismatic Greek tragedy professor at Cambridge University, Fosca is adored by staff and students alike, particularly by the members of a secret society of female students known as The Maidens.
Mariana Andros is a brilliant but troubled group therapist who becomes fixated on The Maidens when one member, a friend of Mariana’s niece Zoe, is found murdered in Cambridge.
Mariana, who was once herself a student at the university, quickly suspects that behind the idyllic beauty of the spires and turrets, and beneath the ancient traditions, lies something sinister. And she becomes convinced that, despite his alibi, Edward Fosca is guilty of the murder. But why would the professor target one of his students? And why does he keep returning to the rites of Persephone, the maiden, and her journey to the underworld?
When another body is found, Mariana’s obsession with proving Fosca’s guilt spirals out of control, threatening to destroy her credibility as well as her closest relationships. But Mariana is determined to stop this killer, even if it costs her everything—including her own life.
Michaelides was born and raised in Cyprus. He has an M.A. in English literature from Trinity College, Cambridge University, and an M.A. in screenwriting from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.
“The Silent Patient” was his first novel and was the biggest-selling debut in the world in 2019. It spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list and sold in a record-breaking forty-nine countries.
Photo: Front cover of the Persian translation of Alex Michaelides’s novel “The Maidens”.
It’s been in existence since the 1500s but the Kaaps language, synonymous with Cape Town in South Africa, has never had a dictionary until now. The Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps has been launched by a collective of academic and community stakeholders – the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape along with the hip hop-driven community NGO Heal the Hood. The dictionary – in Kaaps, English and Afrikaans – holds the promise of being a powerful democratic resource. Adam Haupt, director of the Centre for Film & Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, is involved in the project and tells us more.
What is Kaaps and who uses the language?
Kaaps or Afrikaaps is a language created in settler colonial South Africa, developed by the 1500s. It took shape as a language during encounters between indigenous African (Khoi and San), South-East Asian, Dutch, Portuguese and English people. It could be argued that Kaaps predates the emergence of an early form of Kaaps-Hollands (the South African variety of Dutch that would help shape Afrikaans). Traders and sailors would have passed through this region well before formal colonisation commenced. Also consider migration and movement on the African continent itself. Every intercultural engagement would have created an opportunity for linguistic exchange and the negotiation of new meaning.
Today, Kaaps is most commonly used by largely working class speakers on the Cape Flats, an area in Cape Town where many disenfranchised people were forcibly moved by the apartheid government. It’s used across all online and offline contexts of socialisation, learning, commerce, politics and religion. And, because of language contact and the temporary and seasonal migration of speakers from the Western Cape, it is written and spoken across South Africa and beyond its borders.
It is important to acknowledge the agency of people from the global South in developing Kaaps – for example, the language was first taught in madrassahs (Islamic schools) and was written in Arabic script. This acknowledgement is imperative especially because Afrikaner nationalists appropriated Kaaps in later years.
For a great discussion of Kaaps and explanation of examples of words and phrases from this language, listen to this conversation between academic Quentin Williams and journalist Lester Kiewit.
How did the dictionary come about?
The dictionary project, which is still in its launch phase, is the result of ongoing collaborative work between a few key people. You might say it’s one outcome of our interest in hip hop art, activism and education. We are drawn to hip hop’s desire to validate black modes of speech. In a sense, this is what a dictionary will do for Kaaps.
Quentin Williams, a sociolinguist, leads the project. Emile and Tanswell Jansen serve on the editorial board on behalf of Heal the Hood, which is an NGO that employs hip hop education in youth development initiatives. Emile also worked with hip hop and theatre practitioners on a production called Afrikaaps, which affirmed Kaaps and narrated some of its history. Anthropologist H. Samy Alim is the founding director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity and Language at Stanford University and has assisted in funding the dictionary, with the Western Cape’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport.
CD art from the musical Afrikaaps.Courtesy of Afrikaaps/Dylan Valley
We’re in the process of training the core editorial board in the scientific area of lexicography, translation and transcription. This includes the archiving of the initial, structured corpus for the dictionary. We will write down definitions and determine meanings of old and new Kaaps words. This process will be subjected to a rigorous review and editing and stylistic process of the Kaaps words we will enter in the dictionary. The entries will include their history of origin, use and uptake. There will also be a translation from standard Afrikaans and English.
Who will use the dictionary?
It will be a resource for its speakers and valuable to educators, students and researchers. It will impact the ways in which institutions, as loci of power, engage speakers of Kaaps. It would also be useful to journalists, publishers and editors keen to learn more about how to engage Kaaps speakers.
A Kaaps dictionary will validate it as a language in its own right. And it will validate the identities of the people who speak it. It will also assist in making visible the diverse cultural, linguistic, geographical and historical tributaries that contributed to the evolution of this language.
Kaaps was relegated to a slang status of Afrikaans?
Acknowledgement of Kaaps is imperative especially because Afrikaner nationalists appropriated Kaaps in order to create the dominant version of the language in the form of Afrikaans. A ‘suiwer’ or ‘pure’ version, claiming a strong Dutch influence, Afrikaans was formally recognised as an official language of South Africa in 1925. This was part of the efforts to construct white Afrikaner identity, which shaped apartheid based on a belief in white supremacy.
Read more: Afrikaner identity in post-apartheid South Africa remains stuck in whiteness
For example, think about the Kaaps tradition of koesiesters – fried dough confectionery – which was appropriated (taken without acknowledgement) and the treats were named koeksisters by white Afrikaners. They were claimed as a white Afrikaner tradition. The appropriation of Kaaps reveals a great deal about the extent to which race is socially and politically constructed. As I have said elsewhere, cultural appropriation is both an expression of unequal relations of power and is enabled by them.
When people think about Kaaps, they often think about it as ‘mixed’ or ‘impure’ (‘onsuiwer’). This relates to the ways in which they think about ‘racial’ identity. They often think about coloured identity as ‘mixed’, which implies that black and white identities are ‘pure’ and bounded; that they only become ‘mixed’ in ‘inter-racial’ sexual encounters. This mode of thinking is biologically essentialist.
Read more: How Cape Town's "Gayle" has endured -- and been adopted by straight people
Of course, geneticists now know that there is not sufficient genetic variation between the ‘races’ to justify biologically essentialist understandings. Enter cultural racism to reinforce the concept of ‘race’. It polices culture and insists on standard language varieties by denigrating often black modes of speech as ‘slang’ or marginal dialects.
Can a dictionary help overturn stereotypes?
Visibility and the politics of representation are key challenges for speakers of Kaaps – be it in the media, which has done a great job of lampooning and stereotyping speakers of Kaaps – or in these speakers’ engagement with governmental and educational institutions. If Kaaps is not recognised as a bona fide language, you will continue to see classroom scenarios where schoolkids are told explicitly that the way in which they speak is not ‘respectable’ and will not guarantee them success in their pursuit of careers.
This dictionary project, much like ones for other South African languages like isiXhosa, isiZulu or Sesotho, can be a great democratic resource for developing understanding in a country that continues to be racially divided and unequal.
To say that we have a colorful and rich vocabulary in Maine is an understatement. Maine is one of those states where people 'from away" can visit and not understand most of what we are talking about at any given time (see: Dooryard). But with Maine becoming one of the hottest destinations in the country, we think it might be helpful to share some Maine words and phrases so that you newbies to our state can get in the Maine groove.
We polled Mainers and asked them what words they would want to be added as an official word to the English language. Here are the top 45 choices:
45 Maine Words That Should Be Added To The Dictionary
Here are 45 Maine slang words that we think should be added to Merriam-Webster, Funk & Wagnalls, or any legit dictionary of your choice.
Things People Say That Make Mainers Roll Their Eyes
TOP SPOTS IN MAINE WITH AMAZING CUSTOMER SERVICE
In Maine, it's not hard to find businesses, restaurants, and shops with great customer service. It could be we are that way because of the many tourists that visit us. Or it just might be our stubborn Yankee roots that we like to treat people the way we want to be treated.
20 Of the Best Places in Maine to People Watch
We asked Maineers where they go to people watch. Here were the Top 20 responses.
Without reading translated books, we’re only seeing a tiny sliver of the literature the world has to offer. Authors are writing incredible books in a variety of languages around the world, but only a small percentage make their way to English translations.
If you’re looking for a place to start reading books in translation, Preply has created a great resource for you. They have compiled the most translated books by country, and presented the data in these beautiful maps! You can check out their original post for more information on some of the titles included.
The Most Translated Books of the World
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Did you guess the most translated book in the world? It’s The Little Prince, which has been translated to more than 380 different languages! Following after that is The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. These are both considered classics that have had many decades to accumulate translations.
Preply excluded from these numbers religious texts that couldn’t be easily attributed to a single author or country.
The Most Translated Books of North America
I highly recommend taking a moment to try to guess which title from the U.S. is the most translated before you scroll.
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If you’re surprised by that last title, Preply explains:
The most translated single book in North America and the only self-help book on the world map is from the United States: L. Ron Hubbard’s The Way to Happiness. Translated into more than 112 languages, this booklet lists 21 moral commandments for readers to follow.
Hubbard also happens to be the founder of the Church of Scientology, so the unsolicited distribution of these texts in schools and other public buildings has caused quite the controversy. “Ask, and you shall receive” is presumably not one of its guiding principles.
*In light of sexual misconduct allegations against Junot Diaz, consider supporting the work of other Dominican authors like Rita Indiana, Julia Alvarez, and Angie Cruz.
The Most Translated Books of South America
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Unsurprisingly, the most translated title on the South American continent is The Alchemist by Paulo Cohelo. Like The Little Prince, it doubles as both a novel and a fable about living well, and it’s still popular decades after publication.
The Most Translated Books in Europe
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As you might expect, Europe has many children’s titles that have been published in a variety of languages. Still, it’s interesting to see that this isn’t an exact overlap with their most popular children’s books — it seems like the books that have been around for longer (like Bambi) have the best chance of getting lots of translations, regardless of whether they’re currently the most popular book in that country.
The Most Translated Books in Africa
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Another fable makes the list on the African continent: The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright by Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has been published in more than 60 languages. These short tales that give insight into the human condition seem to have universal appeal, making them attractive as translation options.
The Most Translated Books in Asia
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Pop quiz: who’s the most translated novelist on the Asian continent? Most likely you already got it or are kicking yourself now: it’s Haruki Murakami. Norwegian Wood ties for the most translated book from Asia with Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.
The Most Translated Books in Oceania
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The most translated work from New Zealand is The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera, a fantastic children’s story about a Maori girl who has to prove that she is the once in a generation “whale rider,” despite that title traditionally only going to men. It was also made into a movie!
Those are the most translated books form every country in the world! Did any come as a surprise? You can check out Preply’s data and methodology and well as their original post for more information.
And if you liked this post, you’ll probably also like the infographics of The Most Popular Children’s Books From Every Country In the World!
