Humorous Amish Anecdotes

A farmhouse outside of Berne, Indiana

By Kevin Williams

I am working on an Amish-oriented story for the online magazine Atlas Obscura.  I look forward to sharing that will all of you soon.

As a journalist, though, I'm often limited by space and word count, but sometimes you get some morsels that are just too fun not to share but there just isn't space to work them into the story.  During the course of this story I connected with Greg Humpa, a linguist and now an administrator for a non-profit in San Francisco.  He spent a lot of time in the early 90s studying the unusual Amish dialects found around Berne, Indiana.   He was actually there around the same time I first started venturing into the Berne settlement, he was studying language, while I was studying the culinary culture.  I get a little wistful hearing about his life trajectory because he sort of moved on from the Amish. I didn't.  25 years later, here I still am. While I have found my studies of the Amish over the years extremely fulfilling, I'd be lying if I said I didn't sometimes wonder what my life would be like today had I just moved on and spread my journalistic wings. When you get to be my age you just become increasingly aware of how fast time goes and that life gives you few "do overs."

Anyway, back to the morsels "too fun not too share" from Greg: