JOHN DeMONT: The agreeable history of the strangled yup

It was Elizabeth Bishop’s birthday the other day.

In the way that these things happen, I found myself reading something written by the woman some critics consider one of the most important American poets of the 20th century, who happened to be born in Worcester, Massachusetts, but spent some of her most memorable years in tiny, luminous Great Village.

The poem is called The Moose, and I would urge you to have a look, since it is a real beaut, and because — as Bishop herself once would have done — it bids a sad goodbye to a place on the Bay of Fundy where the sun sets “on red, gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat, clapboard churches.”

The best use of this space would be just to reprint the whole poem, but since the laws of copyright prevent that I will just say that in stanza 19 we read of old Amos who began to pray “even in the store” until finally his family put him away.

Which led to the following response:

“Yes…”that peculiar
affirmative. “Yes…”
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means “Life’s like that.
We know it (also death).”

When I read those words I may have gulped some air, and, uttered a single “ahhyup” followed, in quick succession, by “yup, yup, yup.”

Or I may have seemingly lost the power of speech and just gasped like I’d seen a werewolf, or was in dire need of my Symbicort inhaler.

I do this so often that I didn’t even need to listen to myself anymore, it's right there front and centre in my speech with the adenoidal timbre, the profusion of “you knows."

I wouldn’t be surprised if you share this verbal quirk, because this is how so many of us speak to each other in our part of the world.

I’ve heard it labeled the Gaelic gasp, which has a certain poetry to it.

But when I phoned Anne Furlong, a linguist and associate professor in the English Department at the University of Prince Edward Island, she called it something more substantive-sounding: pulmonic ingressive speech, which turns out to be words produced while inhaling rather than exhaling oxygen from the lungs.

Furlong hears it as often on Newfoundland, where she was born, as she does in her adopted province of Prince Edward Island.

It’s not some random thing.

“In every place and community there are different ways of organizing conversation,” Furlong told me Tuesday.

In Atlantic Canada that’s where the inhaled affirmative — whether “yes,” “yeah” or “yup” — comes in.

In some cases, well the way I tend to mostly use it, it’s a way of keeping the conversation moving along, of saying, as Furlong puts it, “I know it is my turn … but I have nothing more to say,” and passing it back to the speaker.

That serves a purpose. But it’s not the only one.

“It’s more than letting the speaker know that you agree with them,” she explained. “It means I share your understanding of the situation.”

In that manner the strangled yup is a way of establishing solidarity, as it does in the Bishop poem, where the second speaker’s yes is, at the same time, a groan about the pain of life, but also a stoic acceptance of it.

It’s not just Maritimers who do this; Furlong hears it as often on Newfoundland, where she was born, as she does in her adopted province of Prince Edward Island.

Academic research has concluded that pulmonic ingressive speech patterns probably have their roots in the Scandinavian countries. (A few years back Furlong was watching a Swedish version of the Wallander crime series and, though speaking no Swedish, she knew exactly what an actor meant while they uttered “yup” in a way that would sound familiar in Inverness County, Cape Breton, or on Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula.)

The thinking is that travellers from those climes passed them on to the Celts, who, long years later, migrated to North America, ending up in places like Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland.

It doesn’t take long to acquire those speech patterns. Take it from me: I lived in Cape Breton twice, both times just briefly.

But I’ve been around the descendants of Scottish Highlanders and folks from the Hebrides all my life. So, my conversation is peppered with intakes of air, and breathless affirmations that remind me of my mom, dad, aunts and uncles.

I used to think the barely detectable yups and yeahs were just place-holders, some kind of verbal tic, perhaps even the precursor to some cognitive malady.

It is good to know that when I speak that way I’m part of a tradition that straddles the globe and the ages. Yes, yup, yeah it is.