Word: da
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...more than a century, residents of New York City's borough of Brooklyn have been bunking into friends over on Toidy-Toid or Eighty-Foist streets or udder pernts around the place. Whether they ogled da goils, hersted da flag or simply berled in the noonday sun, they absolutely moidered the King's English. The "vulgar speech" that H.L. Mencken denounced in The American Language was long the despair of philologists, as well as a rich source of argot and gag lines for stand-up comics. But now Brooklynese seems to have just about gone...
...19th century. Moreover, Griffith finds that the trademark Brooklyn diphthong oi also appears in many Gaelic words; taoiseach (leader) and barbaroi (barbarians), for example. He also points out that the th sound is absent in both Gaelic and Brooklynese, in which it becomes a hard / or d (as in da dame wid tin legs). Some classic Brooklyn expressions, he adds, come directly from the Gaelic: whudda card (joker) is a corruption of caird (an itinerant tramp); put da kibosh on it (put an end to it) comes from caip baish, or cap of death, a facecloth that inhabitants of southwest...
...Jersey." But Griffith takes no pride in having helped put the kibosh on the dialect. "Brooklynese had a bluntness and homeliness," he says. "There is a real joy in variety. Now we're becoming phonetically homogeneous." And that, as they used to say in Brooklyn, is for da boids...
...Armed Forces Movement, the rebel group that overthrew the regime of Marcello Caetano last April and ended half a century of dictatorial rule in Portugal, finally decided to flex their muscles publicly. In short order, the men of A.F.M. forced the resignation of civilian Prime Minister Adeline da Palma Carlos, a moderate, and got their own man installed as his successor. They then presided over the appointment of a new military-dominated Cabinet. As one Lisbon newspaper editor observed, "The young officers have carried out a second coup...
...Prime Minister Adelino da Palma Carlos, 69, a moderate law professor appointed by Spínola, conditions were intolerable. The Cabinet he headed was not of his choosing, and he had no authority over it. Among other things, he insisted that the Council of State, which is dominated by the military and acts as the country's watchdog committee, draw up a constitution and elevate him to something more than a mere "Cabinet coordinator." The council agreed to let him appoint Ministers but refused him added authority...