#mainer

grandpa takes the pitchfork out of my hand and starts to dig. he keeps hooking potatoes with the prongs. he picks one up. “I butchered it.” he looks it over, and then throws it behind him. “that one’s history.”

his wife says loudly from the edge of the garden, “y’know, I tend to use a shovel to turn them over, and that way you don’t take big hunks out of each one.”

So a mermaid is half girl half fish yes with the top half being girl and the bottom being fish. Mer being a descriptor of maid aka "fish girl" you percieve the creature to be girl first and then fish making girl the noun and fish the adjective.

So with this logic we can assume that "maidmer" would be a creature with the top half of a fish and the bottom half of a human with the first percieved attribute being fish "mer-" and the second being human "maid" thus making "mer" or fish the noun and "maid or girl the adjective or descriptor.

So "maidmer" or "girl fish" but that doesn't exactly role off the tongue and mer is usually a beginner not and ender. Substituting the prefix mer- meaning marine with a word like Mariner and add the descriptor maid to the front we'd get "maidmariner" removing repeat letters would leave us with "maridner". For the sake of easing speach I'm removing the harsh "r" and "d" because they make the word clunky and hard to say.

This leaves us with "Mainer". And as you may know Maine is a coatal state in the northeast of the U.S.