Words for grandparents: was: Pittsburgh Dialect

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:43 PM -0700 10/19/00, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>lynne murphy reports "nana" in WASP families, in response to larry
>horn's speculation that it's a jewish thing.

Actually I said in my message that the relevant term was "Nanny (not
Nana)".  I wouldn't have thought of calling "Nana" a jewish thing; au
contraire.

>from my teenage days, in the '50s in eastern pennsylvania: "nana"
>used, in my experience, *only* by two WASP families (good
>episcopalians all).  each family had two living grandmothers but no
>living grandfathers, so i can't report on the male counterpart to
>"nana".
>
>in any case, at the time i thought it must be an upper-middle-class
>thing.  i did notice it, though - probably because i became close to
>these families not long after reading zola's novel Nana, which gave
>all this talk of "nana greene" etc. an odd flavor to me.
>
there was also the sheepdog/governess in Peter Pan, who was the first
Nana I'd ever encountered.  I remember wondering at the time (I was 5
when I saw it) whether there was a connection between the Darlings'
furry Nana and our (decidedly UN-furry) Nanny.  (We had a live-in
"mother's helper" at the time, but I never would have thought of her
as a nanny, since no such common noun existed for me, the term having
been pre-empted for the family variant of "Grandma".)

larry