I GOT THE IDEAR: MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MAINE LANGUAGE

 by Marion Kingston Stocking

with an introduction and essay “Maine Dialects”
 by Pauleena MacDougall

“At first at Orono I attacked student spelling with the missionary zeal of the new instructor. I had some success with standard American misspellings:

            You wouldn’t believe a lie for a minute,
             But the word believe has a lie right in it.

But Maine spellings were a different matter.  A student, revising, would cross out and rewrite a problem word two or three times, and unless he went to the dictionary he often as not spelled it the way it sounded.  When I noted in the margin that I was amused by squarbell for squabble, the student was offended:  ‘It wasn’t surposed to be funny.’ The first paper in which I marked morden came back with the word “corrected” to modren. Later I was to receive mordren.  Interlectual was improved in another paper to interlectural.  A word like propaganda was infinitely misspellable.  I rather like propergander.”

   Marion Kingston Stocking has been an editor since 1938 when she began editing the yearbooks for the summer camp where she was counselor. In 1943 she edited student writing (aka "graded freshmen themes") in graduate school and continued as a teacher of writing even after "retirement."

From 1944 until recently she has been editing manuscripts of the Byron-Shelley circle and since 1954 the Beloit Poetry Journal, assembling A Folk-Song Chapbook for the magazine in 1955.  In 1977 she and her husband David became founders, owners, publishers and editors of the Latona Press in Lamoine, Maine.