Letters to the Editor

Volume VI Number 45
November 12-18, 1998

Pro and Con Backwoods' Bill

Dear New Bay Times~Weekly:

I don't get to read New Bay Times very often, being as I live on Massachusetts' Martha's Vineyard these days. Menemsha and Tashmoo are now more frequent haunts than Solomons, West River and Deale.

I enjoyed Burton's column of October 15-21 very much and hope he'll do more of the same in the future. Though a New Englander and not a stranger to the water at all, I lived for nearly 20 years in Maryland and resonate to its ways of speaking as well as mine.

My wife's mother was English, from a part of the "Back Country" that has a distinctive way of speaking. We used to get a newspaper from there. The most interesting column was the one describing old times in the old-time dialect.

I hope you will continue to print columns like the one I enjoyed so much.

-Donald Mayhew, Martha's Vineyard

Dear New Bay Times~Weekly:

Re Bill Burton's backwards, ah, backwoods column [Oct. 15-21]: Bill should be stick'n to fish'n', that's wot I'm wish'n.

-Sincerely, D.C. Bourne

Praise and Punditry

Dear New Bay Times~Weekly:

Apropos Pat Piper's Bay Reflection "Come Here and Go Home" [November 5-11]: we are all Come-Heres somewhere, (in Maine I am From Away, as I recall), and what more choice spot could there be to be a Come-Here than the Western Shore. Yes, Pat, my answer to the Eastern Shore is for us to be the Western Shore. We're entitled as much as they, though we may have to enlist John Barth to do a Sot Weed Factor for our side of the Bay.

As a two-year Mason's Beach Come-Here (why not capitals for Come-Here?), I revel every day in the beauty of the Bay. And the New Bay Times is a great guide; thanks, Sandra and friends.

I have caught some of the concerns of South County since arriving, and derive special satisfaction from the election of Janet Owens, with her history in Lothian, to the county executive's post. Earlier on Election Day I shook hands with John Klocko at the Deale firehouse and suggested that perhaps South County should secede; that doesn't seem necessary now.

A couple of pedantic notes about the paper this week:

In your admirable editorial "Campaign '98: The Message is the Middle", you say that the political careers of Messrs. Evans, Callahan and Redmond "lay" in ruins. My sense is that "lie" fits better.

And in M.L. Faunce's lovely ode to November, "Who's Here? November, Already?" (what a fine writer she is!), I think in Bay country "the birds are no less interested in a little refreshment than [rather than as] we are at day's end."

Western Shore, Western Shore, Western Shore, Western Shore, Western Shore.

-Chris May, Deale

Editor's note: Ah, those troublesome verbs. For grammar's sake, we meant to write those careers crumbled in ruin. And, though we would not steal Pat Piper's thunder, here at NBT we do capitalize Western Shore.