Our Hometown
Berlin | Rachelle Beaudoin
Clip | 5m 37sVideo has Closed Captions
Berlin has a language all its own, and Rachelle decided to compile a dictionary of words.
Berlin has a language all its own, and Rachelle decided to compile a dictionary of words & phrases which are unique to this multi-ethnic city.
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Our Hometown is a local public television program presented by NHPBS
Our Hometown
Berlin | Rachelle Beaudoin
Clip | 5m 37sVideo has Closed Captions
Berlin has a language all its own, and Rachelle decided to compile a dictionary of words & phrases which are unique to this multi-ethnic city.
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So I wanted to talk about this project I did in 2009 called the Berlin Dictionary, and I consider it an art project, but it is a self-published dictionary of words that are unique to Berlin, New Hampshire.
And I consider it an art project because it was really a collaboration.
And I sort of see myself as like the lead artist, organizer of something, and I just kind of pulled it out of the community, something that was already there.
So starting the process for this in 2008 or so, my husband and I were driving back and forth to Berlin a lot and we would often he grew up here as well.
We would often talk about these kind of Berlin words that we had.
So like, you've got this little muss, you have a little muss like on your shoulder, let me just take it.
And then we sort of realized, I think after we had left Berlin, that like not everyone knows what a muss is.
And somehow this seemed like funny to us and kind of unique, and that there were a lot of words like this, like piton means any kind of button, but kind of a button that you can't name.
Like just press that, you know, that that piton over there.
And so we thought like there might be enough of these to sort of get them together and make an actual book project out of them.
And I had a mentor, another artist I had known who had made a kind of alternative dictionary.
So this was kind of like floating around.
And I was in art school at the time.
So we decided just to start it up, like just to see if we could collect them.
And so we collected them the way you kind of do anything in Berlin, which is to stand outside one of the grocery stores called the IGA.
So when we were young, we would like stand out there and ask for money for Little League or sell candy bars or something.
So it's kind of like a known place where you might be busking, kind of like, for lack of a better word, you'd be standing out there tagging, asking for money.
So it's not unexpected that someone would be just kind of approaching you at the IGA and it's covered, so you can do it in any kind of weather.
So the first part of the project was just standing outside asking people if they had Berlin words and then having them write those words down.
we got a lot of submissions this way, like just, yeah, just knocking on doors and just asking people what are some of your Berlin words?
And then we got some press, I think, on NHPR, maybe even in the Union-Leader, that we were doing this project and collecting words and people started to mail them in, which is really awesome.
And one of them that I got that kind of surprised me was from my fifth grade teacher who I hadn't thought about in a really long time and who was a nun, Sister Cecile Morissette.
And she had typed out all of these words that were either French words or these sort of, Franglais, sort of hybrid words of French and English and she had to actually add the accents by hand because she didn't know how to type the accents, because it's hard to type the accent.
So people were sending me lists of like 20 words that came to mind.
People were emailing me.
And so, yeah, I collected words from over 70 people and was able to put them into the dictionary project and you know, it was going pretty well.
But I also felt like it was kind of missing something.
And I, as I said, I'm an artist and that was an art school, so I decided that some of the words needed illustrations and I think that's kind of like what set it apart or set the tone of the project because the illustrations add some humor to the words.
I think they sometimes fill in a bit more about them.
So one of the words is feces and feces is a nice way to say, buttocks, it's another way to say, yeah, a French, I guess.
It's not nice, but it's a French way of saying butt and so of course I had to illustrate that.
And my husband likes to say that he was the model of the, the feces but yeah, feces.
Yeah.
It was like that has to be in there.
But isn't it funny to have this picture that's kind of like the most simple indication of a butt that you could possibly draw in it.
And I think in the in the book there's like French and English words, but there's also neighborhoods, businesses that people remember really fondly slang that we use for things.
And yeah, lots of things that I wasn't even that familiar with, but people knew from years before.
part of my fascination with this does come from like maybe not fully being from my mom, not being from Berlin and having that split in the family where I did kind of recognize it was a little bit unusual, whereas I think if both parents spoke French, it would have just been everything I'd known.
And then I really think now, looking back on it, some of my interest in these projects also has to do with the fact that my father died when I was 13.
And so I think I wanted to just like learn more about that side of myself and that aspect of my culture because, you know, he wasn't there for me anymore to ask about it.
And I was able to continue talking to my grandmother and learn a lot from her about it.
But yeah, I think that maybe some of my interest in like preserving this was actually like getting to know that side of myself a little bit more.
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