Anyone here live in the New England area of the states?

Woohoo, another angry Masshole. Now I’m nervous. Of all the people to start speaking welsh to it has to be one of my kind. We’re the worst. Oh well, at least when I mock your attempt at bettering yourself you won’t take it seriously, or if you do you’ll bury it deep, deep inside where it will lay dormant in a folder labeled shame in a cabinet of self-loathing.

My skype handle is werewindle937. It is the best skype handle, in the world. Many people have tried to make a better one. They failed, it was horrible. This conversation, it’s going to be wonderful, no, it’s going to be great. You and I, we’re going to make Skype conversations great again. Ugh, my fingers want to barf…

I can’t promise you it will be painless, in fact I am promising you that it will be painful. And I may cheat, I haven’t decided how yet but you being a total stranger, it seems like I should at least try.

feel free to call and we can set something up or just reply on here.

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… Just noticed this…
Are you saying I can only make you chuckle?
I’ll elicit an unsolicited guffaw, you feisty little Welsh strumpet.
And I’ll do it in your language
…rhoi amser i mi.

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Will the mockery of our new orange autocrat-in-chief ever get old? No, no it will not.

I’m a transplanted Masshole. I grew up in Maine where people are generally quite lovely and friendly, if a bit reserved at first (although they did manage to elect a governor who bragged “I was Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular,” but that’s an anomaly deriving from Maine’s unusual 3rd party system splitting the vote [also, ::shiver::, it feels like I just contaminated this peaceful Welsh oasis by mentioning trumpelstiltskin’s name, so apologies for that…]). Anyway, when I moved to MA I had to toughen up, especially once I started driving.

Also, I will totally cheat, by which I mean I’ll have dictionaries and notes and google translate in front of me the whole time, which is totally not cheating because whatever helps you learn is great. Now I have to go and figure out what my Skype handle is because it’s been so long. Either that or I’ll come up with a new one, and I guarantee you if I do it will be the best one ever invented, better than everyone else’s. Just great, a fantastic Skype handle.

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My whole family is from Maine. Get your own backstory!

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I’m from Bangor. We have an enormous, hideous statue of Paul Bunyan downtown. I’m keeping it.

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My fathers side is from Pittsfield and Etna/Dixmont. Mam’s is down by Augusta. Bangor eh? Love Bangor in all it’s shady frigid ass glory. You find the most interesting people in that area, well as far as the US goes.

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I know those places mainly as exit signs on I95. Do you spend time there ever?

I don’t often hear non-locals saying they love Bangor. Actually, I think that’s a first. Not that it’s a bad place - it was quiet and safe growing up, although as a teenager that translates to “boring.” I’ve always thought that probably Bangor, Wales is a sort of parallel universe to it, and I look forward to visiting it someday.

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Several times a year. I have a cousin in Bangor as well. When I say I love Bangor I’m referring to its eccentricities, and those being appreciated as a visitor, not a resident. And you’re right, love is a strong term, I’m fond of the place. I love northern Vermont and northwestern New Hampshire and have a few properties up there. Boring is a relative term. Teenagers find most places boring. I lived in Boston when I was younger. When I was 25 boring was not closing down a bar every night in Somerville. Now I’m 38, love the country and have a fourth kid on the way. I read 100 books last year. Now, for me, boring is not keeping my brain busy.

Actually, since I just looked at the clock, now is the time to kill brain cells with a tasty beverage. Let me know when your schedule allows for a scintillating welsh conversation about the weather. :wink:

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I have always wondered, sorry to interrupt, but which Bangor was Bangor, Maine named for? The one in Gwynedd or the one in Ireland? Oh, and it’s such fun to see names like Chelmsford and Reading and wonder what the people were like who went to America! Those places don’t exactly represent the pioneering spirit now! (Apologies to anyone from either place who is into extreme sports or exploration! :wink:)

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Good question. I don’t think there’s a definitive answer and I’ve seen both claimed. I personally lean towards it being named from Cymru, though that is only because I had a grandmother named Esther Griffith who’s Griffith great grandparents came from Cymru not long after the revolutionary war and settled that area.

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Exactly what all the course building hard work was aiming at…:slight_smile:

That got a slight smile. You’re going backwards. I may have to freeze your account until we can figure out what’s going on.

Understood. I’ll tone it down.

What? No! That was me being (unsuccessfully) sardonic. And the Trumpesque comment was meant to be satire!

… oh. Yeah that one went over my head like Andromeda. Boy that’s going to make that apology email I sent even more awkward. HA. I love it.

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Still not as bad as the time I made my future sister-in-law cry on the phone (yes, I thought I was being funny then, too)…

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See, SO many inappropriate ways I can redirect that comment. You can’t give me that kind of material and expect me to behave. But, out of respect the rest of the board, I’ll go with:

So now you’re a hardened emotionless robot that long ago allowed your spirit to be crushed by the weight of the world and now find yourself unable to relate to the most basic of human stimuli? Good, it’s not just me then.

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Growing up I always heard that it was named for the hymn tune Bangor. There’s an urban legend that when one of the founders went to register the town name, he was humming the tune “Bangor” and the registrar asked, “What’s the town?” and he thought he’d said, “What’s the tune?” and so the name ended up as Bangor instead of whatever they’d planned. It seems wildly implausible that a mistake like that wouldn’t be corrected 30 seconds later, so ultimately the answer is that I don’t know. There are a ton of copycat names here from all parts of the UK, though, as well as Israel/Palestine/surrounding areas. Maine also has a bunch of towns named after other foreign locations including Paris, China, Calais, etc - often pronounced wrong. It’s sort of a local running joke. Anyway, it’s one of the oldest parts of the US in terms of European settlements, so they hadn’t gotten creative yet as they did further west.

It occurs to me that I’ve been doing the old Course 1, not the new Level 1, so our vocabularies may be a little different… It’s a long story involving broken wifi on my cell phone so I stuck with what I’d originally downloaded. I’m on lesson 19 right now and am planning to finish Course 1 and then switch to the new material and run through Level 1, hopefully much faster this time around. From poking around on the forum I understand that the vocab is similar but that the new material has more idiomatic speech, so we should be OK. Also I’m just assuming I’ll look like an idiot either way, so really, what’s the difference?

Also, shout out to how difficult it is to translate humor in written form with people you’ve never met. I haven’t even really tried here 'cause I’ll fall flat on my face :slight_smile:

Oh, forgot to say - I’m not usually home before 8 or 9 Mon-Thu but am free after that or on weekends.

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Bethlehem in Wales is named for the one where Jesus was born, so if there is a Bethlehem in USA, we will not know after which that was named!!

Oh yeah, we’ve got lots of Bethlehems. Not as many as we have Concords, Littletons, Essex, etc… but there’s a lot. We have a Swansea Massachusetts that was definitely named for your city. We have a Wales, Mass. Sadly I don’t know of any actual Gymraeg town names like Abertawe. I would think there would have to be some here though. People have been migrating here from the Cymru since the 1500s. You would think that at least some would have used the non-English naming convention. We have enough native American and Germanic town names kicking around for them to go unquestioned.