Words for grandparents: was: Pittsburgh Dialect

[GEORGE THOMPSON]

Beverly Flanigan writes:
        "Nana" is cited by a lot of my students, along with "Gram" (not
        Granny, which they say sound old-fashioned).  I suspect Gram and
        Nana are new-fangled forms, implying (at least for some of my
        students) cool, less "old sounding" terms for their hip young
        grandmothers.  How far back does Nana go?

My only surviving grandparent (at my birth, in 1941) was my mother's
mother.  I called her Nana.  My mother was born in 1900, Nana in
the 1860s.  Both were born in Springfield and had ancestors in the
Connecticut River Valley since early colonial times, though Nana's
husband was from Canada and his father from England.  Mother, Father
and I lived with her in her house.

Considering how some of you folks drool over ripe regional accents,
it is a pity you could not have heard my accent when it was in its
prime, in the 60s and earlier.  I seem to have got it from the Yankee
side of the family, with little influence from my father, who was
entitled to have had a strong working-class Brooklyn accent and way
of speaking, but didn't.  It was considered outlandish in my home
town, and when I was in college I couldn't open my mouth without
someone making an absurd guess as to where I was born: Australia and
Germany being two memorable ones.  Even more a pity you can't hear
the old biddies, of course, including my great-aunt Lulu, Nana's
sister, who also lived with us.

GAT