dialects

I'm fascinated by regional dialects in part because everyone says I sound like I'm from somewhere else. My Midwestern accent was more pronounced when I was very young (it's been modified by some borrowings from Mid-Atlantic, Southern and even Massachusetts English), but it's still pretty recognizable even though I've lived almost my whole life outside the Midwest.

A Harvard kid from the Northeast claimed I sounded like the people in Fargo, but my accent isn't really Scandinavian-flavored Minnesotan (I've never even been to Minnesota). I think it's more Southeast Iowa/Cleveland, gotten from my mother and early childhood: some indistinct mixture of North Central and Inland North. But according to this survey, it looks as if my word usages are not Midwestern or Inland North at all but pretty standard Mid-Atlantic Eastern, as you'd expect from a kid who grew up in suburban northern Virginia but didn't have Southern roots.

Something I always wondered about was the regional distinction, if any, between the two major pronunciations of "aunt". It seemed like it ought to be a North/South thing, but it wasn't. No wonder I was confused: while "ahnt" is mostly Northeastern, I was living near a narrow inclusion of majority "ahnt" that looks like it cuts diagonally through Virginia from Williamsburg through Richmond and Charlottesville. Unless that's just a statistical artifact.

(I say "ant".)

Walkin' in a winterr wonderrrleeeeeeeyaand

Specifically, when I was a little kid, I had pretty definitely taken a complete ride on step one of the Northern Cities Shift. My sister likes to entertain people with an old tape of me singing "Winter Wonderland" (all the verses) that makes that clear. But I realize now that later I actually taught myself to back up about a third of the way.

more dialect differences, including the smoking gun

The phrase "tree lawn" appears to be an intact Northern Ohio expression in my current idiolect.

The synonyms for "crayfish" show the sharpest three-way North-Midland-South regional division I've seen ("crayfish" and "crawdad" both sound OK to me). But the "roll"/"TP" distinction neatly explains a recent goofy pun on Homestar Runner. (Not that it was hard to get, but "roll the house" sounded a bit odd to me; its dominance begins a couple hundred miles south of my old stomping grounds, but the Homestar Runner guys live in, I think, Georgia, which is probably also the reason for The Cheat's Halloween costume).

And everything has outliers all over the country, because of people like me who have moved around. I say "rotary" as a proud badge of my adopted homeland.

This question about public rail systems is dumb because they didn't distinguish between generic terms and specific ones, as in other questions. The subway is the T here, but it certainly isn't in DC. On the other hand, this similar one about "the City" is fascinating: your local city might be the City in one place or another, but New York is THE City.

I, dimwit

The earliest Mac OS X drivers for Wacom Graphire tablets have some strange incompatibility with Panther that makes them work only sporadically. I went back several times to Wacom's driver page to see if they had something new up, and it wasn't until yesterday that I realized that the newest version was at the top. I think that it was the use of an OS version number only on the last-listed one that threw me; I just assumed that the others were for versions older than 10.1.5.