By Victor Greto
REHOBOTH BEACH — Face it: “Rehoboth Shore” just doesn’t sound right.
It’s as silly as hearing Bruce Springsteen say, “I’m going down the beach.”
You might as well walk into a South Philly hoagie shop and ask for a sub with mayo and lettuce. Ugh.
When it comes to what you reflexively call that big body of salty water near the sand, whether you’re from southeast Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Delaware, or even the eastern shore of Maryland — where they tend to go to the “ocean,” not the beach or the shore — it depends on who you are, where you come from, and where you’ve been.
And some people can get pretty adamant about what’s the right and wrong way to say it.
“There is no shore in Delaware,” says Samantha Coveleski, 19, of Lewes, in her third year as a lifeguard at Rehoboth Beach. “We have beaches.”
The varied use of those three little words for the same thing has its beginnings before the founding of the American republic.
So you fans of Henry Ford who think “history is bunk,” or that colonial history doesn’t mean much in the 21st century, fuggedaboudit.
First of all, in terms of word origins, Marylanders are really out of the loop.
“Ocean,” despite its “shh” sound that swoops all-encompassing over the sea like a complacent gull, is Greek in origin, and derives from Okeanos, the Greek god of sea and water. The god often was depicted as having a muscle-bound upper body, long beard and horns, and the torso of a serpent.
Need we say more?
The word also refers to the more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface that is made up of water.
“Do you mean the whole thing, or just right here?” asks Nicole Mayerhauser of Washington, D.C., recently playing hooky from her job as an economist with the U.S. government.
“The whole thing is the ocean,” she says, “but right here, where we’re at, that’s the beach.” Her friend Tameka Harris, also of Washington D.C., agreed.
A linguist or two might agree with them.
“Someone not interested in the wet parts of such a vacation might think of it as the ‘beach,’ and another, who was, might think of it as the ‘ocean,’” says John Lawler, associate professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan. “They all point to the same place, after all. That makes it a name, not a description, and names can be completely arbitrary.”
That makes sense, but let’s dig further into word origins: “ocean” may be derived from the Greek, but “shore” and “beach” are Anglo-Saxon words.
Anglo-Saxon refers to the language originally spoken by those nasty Germanic tribes the Angles and Saxons who settled in what would become England and Great Britain after the fall of Rome about 1,500 years ago.
Anglo-Saxon words (take another gander at the Old English poem “Beowulf,” if you dare) tend to be short and to the point, guttural belches really, perhaps the strongest and most pungent syllables in contemporary English.
So, two different Anglo-Saxon words for what is pretty much the same thing made their way over in the rush of “English” immigration of the 17th and 18th centuries.
And, somehow, they separated out to the point where Kelly Kline of Haddonfield, N.J., reflexively calls water and sand at Rehoboth the shore, and her husband, David Kline, originally from Lebanon, Pa., calls them the beach.
“I think the “shore” term is the most distinct and regionally restricted,” says Elizabeth Pyatt, a linguist at Penn State.
“Shore” seems to be primarily restricted to New Jersey and southeastern Pennsylvania (Philadelphia and Delaware County), as David Kline attests. His hometown of Lebanon, Pa., is miles out of range to the north and east.
As do Wendy and Kelly Elliott, from Bedford, Pa., who recently sunned themselves in Rehoboth, and reflexively called the water and sand the beach. Bedford is near the borders of Maryland and West Virginia, far west of Harrisburg and south of Johnstown.
So, how did “shore” become so geographically embedded in Jersey and Philly, and “beach” encrust itself in Delaware, farther west in Pennsylvania, and points south?
****
According to historian David Hackett Fischer, there were four great waves of “English” immigration to America: the Puritans, from England to Massachusetts, from 1629-1641; the “gentry” or the “upper middle class” and their servants from southern England to Virginia, from 1642-1675; Quakers from the North Midlands and Wales to the Delaware Valley, from 1675-1725; and “common people” from England, northern Ireland and Scotland to the Appalachians, from 1717-1775.
In 1707, England, Ireland and Scotland became the United Kingdom, but they still spoke different languages, and when they spoke English, they used different dialects, inflections and word choice.
So, who said what and why?
“English people say ‘beach,’ and find ‘shore’ a technical and/or poetic word,” says Peter Trudgill, an authority on British dialects and a professor emeritus of English Linguistics at Fribourg University in Switzerland. “Scots, on the other hand, naturally say ‘shore.’”
So, north of Delaware got the Scotch-Irish influence, and south of Philly and western Pennsylvania got the English influence? How so?
“Of course we know that Pennsylvania was subject to large-scale immigration by the Ulster Scots — Scotch Irish, you call them,” Trudgill says.
Aha!
Many of those Scotch-Irish ended up in the Appalachian Mountains to fulfill their destinies playing hillbilly music. But before then, they mixed it up with the Quakers near Philadelphia and into the Garden State.
But this discussion is not restricted to simple nomenclature. It also exists for phrases.
Coveleski, the Lewes-born lifeguard, attends Villanova University near Philadelphia.
“The worst,” she says to her friend, David Coar, 16, of Dover and also a lifeguard, “is when they [her friends from Philadelphia and New Jersey] say, “I’m going down the shore.’”
“What’s that mean?” Coar asks.
“It means they’re going to the beach,” Coveleski says.
“Really?” Coar asks.
Really.
“Down the shore” is a phrase that intrigues Ben Yagoda, a University of Delaware English professor and author of a book on the English language’s parts of speech.
“They use ‘down’ as a preposition — it’s usually an adverb — and take out the word ‘to,’ which doesn’t make sense, but is evocative,” he says.
You mean, like poetry?
“I don’t understand it, calling it the ‘shore’” says Washington D.C.’s Mayerhauser. She’s originally from Maine, where they also call sand and salt water the beach.
The differing names irritate some people, makes them territorial. But it also grounds them. People who go to the beach in Delaware just know it’s the right way to say it.
If the difference means a lot to many, so far it’s been a mystery in the academic world.
“It hasn’t been studied,” says Dennis Preston, professor of linguistics and languages at Michigan State University. “I suspect that no one has noticed this variation before.”
Preston is one of the contributors to the multi-volume Dictionary of American Regional English, published by Harvard, which includes neither “beach” nor “shore” in its volumes.
“While they may be the common local usages,” says Joan Hall, editor of the dictionary, “the written evidence expands the regions of use so that we found plenty of evidence for all the terms in most of the country. We regretted that we couldn’t document what seems to be the prevailing notion, but we erred on the side of caution.”
Sometimes it’s all about how we speak, not how we write, the feeling and history behind the spoken word, and not the etymology behind the written one.
Although it’s only their second year visiting Rehoboth Beach, David Kline, originally of Lebanon, Pa., says his family “still visits the Jersey beach.”
That’s nice, but the sounds those two words make together must be clanging in his wife Kelly’s head.
But the Jersey girl says nothing. She smiles. Isn’t her husband cute?