Helping My Fellow “Burgh”ers

After a conversation about the patois of the Western Pennsylvania people, a friend of mine pointed me in the direction of a little podcast called “Da Burghcast.” Since we were both born and raised in the thick of Beaver County (a particularly rusty section of Pennsylvania) we were able pick up on the thick accents that most people associate with Pittsburgh. While it certainly does apply to the ‘Burgh, it also applies to a very large swath of the western portion of the state.

I listened to the podcast which is generally structured around the weekly NFL season activities of the Pittsburgh Steelers but the hosts, Herb and Buxy, would very quickly digress into almost anything else. The conversations include a lot of professional wrestling talk and obscure Beaver County (BC) references like the Brighton Hot Dog Shoppe, Flesh Mechanics (a Beaver Falls tattoo and piercing parlor), Charlie No-Face, and so on and so on.

Being an expatriate from Ambridge, PA for almost 10 years, it felt awfully cozy hearing the familiar tones of that accent which immediately made me long for the sweaty, humid summers and the biting cold winters. Plus, I still followed the Steelers…like any Western PA native probably would.

After catching up on three seasons of Da Burghcast and repeatedly staring at the default header on their website, I decided to offer my fellow Beaver County natives a hand and I designed a header for them. I didn’t know if I would be stepping on any toes since I certainly didn’t ask them if they wanted my help, but they were incredibly gracious and thankful and accepted my work and placed it on their website. Then they asked for more work if I was willing to do it, which I was happy to do in exchange for their thick-slices of obnoxious nostalgia that they offered up once every week or so…and thanks again.

I probably can’t recommend Da Burghcast to everyone because—unless you’ve spent your formative years in that area—you would either: not understand it, find it offensive, or, worst of all, not find it very entertaining.