Howz dis tawk, Cawta? Bad tinkin’

I had to laugh the other day when I read Jonathan Carter’s defense of his political ad that uses Hollywood mobspeak to criticize John Baldacci’s position on casino gambling in Maine.

How strange that a man who wants to be our next governor doesn’t have the smarts to know that playing off the old Italian gangster stereotype is a political red flag, especially when the Green Independent Party candidate’s barbs were directed at a rival who happens to be proudly Italian-American.

“You wanna roll the dice and trust Baldacci?” asks the voiceover on the Carter ad, sounding an awful lot like wiseguy Ray Liotta in the movie “GoodFellas.” The ad goes on to say of Baldacci’s shifting views on a proposed Maine casino, “If he flipped he can flop – bada-bing, bada-boom – know what I mean?”

Carter insists that the 30-second spot, which features a gangland movie soundtrack and slick shots of glitzy Las Vegas casinos, wasn’t meant to imply that all Italian-Americans are mobbed up. The narrator’s accent, he said, was similar to many heard in New York and New Jersey, and that the ad never even mentions Italians.

“The dialect is one that anyone, regardless of their ethnic background, would have if they lived in Brooklyn or the vicinity,” Carter said in the ad’s defense.

As someone who was born in Brooklyn and raised there for 12 years before moving to New Jersey, all I can say to Mr. Carter is “Whaddya kiddin’ me?”

No one in my family ever once uttered the phrase “bada-bing, bada-boom.” Being Irish Catholics, I’m not sure we would have known what the heck it meant. Neither did we ever say “fuhgedaboudit.” My Italian friends in Brooklyn might have used those expressions, but my Puerto Rican friends certainly did not, nor did my Jewish friends or my Polish friends.

The point is, if Carter decides to defy his many critics and stick with this type of political ad, he might want to drop the Italian-specific routine that has offended so many people and use a more generic Brooklyn dialect that is familiar to everyone in the great borough, “regardless of their ethnic background.”

It’s called Brooklynese, a curious language all its own that people everywhere have been harmlessly making fun of without political fallout for generations.

Here are a few basic linguistic guidelines to help Carter’s scriptwriters get started:

First, the letters “o” and “a” are always pronounced “aw,” as in New Yawk, cawfee, chawclate and tawk.

In Brooklyn, where there is no “th,” kids enjoy themselves by “trowin’ a bawl to one anuddah.” If they’re playing stickball, they might use a special rubber ball called a Spaldeen, a brand that the rest of the country knows as Spalding.

If they’re playing a game that involves throwing the Spaldeen against their front steps, they’re playing stoopbawl.

As exceptions to the “th” rule, “the,” “that,” “those” and “them” are pronounced “da,” “dat,” “dose” and “dem.”

Also, there is no final “r” in old-fashioned Brooklynese, which makes all of the residents New Yawkahs, troo and troo. The Yankee baseball player Derek Jeter is therefore known as Derek Jetah, if you’re a Yankee fan, or “Jetah da bum” if you root for da Mets.

When Jetah walks, the umpire awards him first base on a cawl bawl faw.

The exception to this rule, one that many Maine people might be familiar with, is that the final “r” is pronounced only when there is no final “r” in the word. So, in keeping with the baseball analogy, Mike Piazza of the Mets becomes Mike Piazzer, the catchah.

The letter combination “oi” is pronounced “er.” By this unique linguistic alchemy, aluminum foil is transformed into something called aluminum ferl, a product that Brooklyn muddahs have always used to wrap tunafish samwidges or hot dawgs or whatevah.

The “er” sound, on the other hand, is pronounced “oi,” which gets Piazzer the catchah to “foist” or “toid,” and magically changes British earls into British oils.

So there you have it, for what it’s worth – ethnically neutral Brooklynese without the objectionable bada-bings, bada-booms and fuhgedaboudits that have caused Carter so much bad press lately. Most Maine voters probably would prefer to watch wiseguys on “The Sopranos” than listen to them in their governor’s race.