My mother was watching a news channel yesterday and a piece about the current US president came on. She uses closed captioning because of her profound hearing loss, so thankfully I didn’t have to hear him. I said something like “Oh brother, now what?” and she laughed and declared him a scallywag. He certainly is.

Partly through hearing loss and partly through being raised by people born in rural PEI in the 1800s and early 1900s, my mother uses some interesting pronunciations and phrases, some of which I have also adopted.

When Biden stepped down from the 2024 US presidential election, my mother said it was because he was too “doty”, which means feeble-minded, in your dotage. Not dotty, though kind of the same.

My mother calls the red tomato sauce catsup, because that’s what it used to be, though most people say and spell it ketchup now. And she always pronounces tomato “to-mah-to”.

Drought, as in a prolonged period of dry weather, she pronounces to rhyme with “truth”, so “druth”, which sounds very old country to me.

Something I’ve never heard outside our family came from her uncle Everett Hardy. She always said that he called a windy, rainy storm a pompero, as in “it’s blowing a pompero,” and she would often refer to a storm that way. I could never find any other reference to this word and sort of thought he just made it up.

I was at the Summerside library a few years ago and they had just received a reprint of The Sailor’s Word-Book, which is a list of nautical words. I looked up pompero and didn’t find anything, but flipped around the “p” section and found:

Pampero: A violent squall of wind from the S.W., attended with rain, thunder, and lightning, over the immense plains or pampas of the Rio de la Plata, where it rages like a hurricane.

Bingo! How did her uncle, who never travelled much further than Nova Scotia once or twice, learn a word from South America? He loved to read, especially about sailing and the sea, so perhaps he learned about it in a book, but I rather expect it was something he heard someone else use, a word that travelled on the ships that moved up and down the Atlantic. My mother and I still call a wild storm a pompero, so guess that mispronunciation is our very own word.

To express surprise we may say “Land o’Goshen”, or use “by cracky” for emphasis, by cracky.

My mother has never sworn in all my 40+ years of living with her. She called someone an ass a couple of years ago, and that’s the worst I’ve ever heard. My surprise at hearing that word come out of her mouth, and the intent behind it, made me laugh until I cried. And yes, I can confirm the fellow in question is an ass, and it’s not the scallywag-in-chief to the south but someone who lives close by who will remain nameless…and an ass.

I used to be a bit ashamed of my PEI accent, and used to actively tamp it down when I lived off Island, but now I don’t care and it’s as thick as it probably was when I was a child. I definitely use the inhaled “yuh” a lot, eh?