more dialect differences, including the smoking gun

[mmcirvin]

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.

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

I like this one about a cabinet/milkshake. When I first moved to Rhode Island, people asked, "want a cabinet" and I said "Huh? A what?" So I thought everyone here called those milky things a "cabinet". But of the 78 Rhode Island survey participants, slightly more actually said "milkshake":

63. What do you call the drink made with milk and ice cream?
a. milkshake/shake (43.88%)
b. frappe (9.18%)
c. cabinet (42.86%)
f. other (4.08%)

This seems totally contrary to my experience talking to people. But maybe those 43% moved in from somewhere else. Everyone I've talked to about this who has lived in RI his or her entire life says "cabinet".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

samantha2074 says that a milkshake and a frappe are different things.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Really? Where did she grow up? What is the difference?

My Ellie (a lifetime Rhode Islander) says no one in her family would even know the word "frappe" or what it was at all. She says "egg cream" is a New York term, and "cabinet" is much preferred over "milkshake".

These differences all seem foreign to me -- growing up, I only ever heard "milkshake" and wouldn't have recognized the other three terms as food of any kind ;-) ... !

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

She grew up in New Hampshire, mostly.

I think an "egg cream" is yet a third thing. Which does not have eggs. Or cream.

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Frappes contain ice cream; milkshakes just have milk and syrup.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

To me, the first thing was always a milkshake. The second didn't have a name, other than "chocolate milk".

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Hmm, here's what i found:

You've had chocolate milk made with milk and chocolate syrup? Coffee milk is the same thing but with coffee syrup. Finish your lunch with a Coffee Cabinet (a coffee flavored milk shake). The main ingredient of this shake is "coffee milk," first introduced to Rhode Islanders in the early 1920's. Coffee milk became so popular in Rhode Island that in 1993 the Rhode Island state legislature voted coffee milk as the official state drink. It's called a "Cabinet" because its originator kept his blender in a "kitchen cabinet."

[...]

Simply add 2 tablespoons of coffee syrup to 8 ounces of hot or cold milk. If you add ice cream to coffee milk then you are drinking a "coffee cabinet" or in outsider's terms a coffee milk frappe.

Let me just say that i find this all an incredible offense to the English language.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Wow. Coffee milk has always seemed quite yucky to me. Ew.

Such a drink becomes a Rhode Island meal with the addition of a Del's and some pizza strips.

[kerri9494.livejournal.com]

OK, now you're just trolling me, right?

Plorkwort is the rightest so far.

Milkshake = milk and syrup (Eclipse or, for the newbies, Autocrat, in either coffee, strawberry, or vanilla -- I don't think either company makes a chocolate syrup...we always used Bosco).
Cabinet = milk and syrup and ice cream (coffee is the most popular).
Frappe = something those people in Massachusetts make, which is kinda like a cabinet, but I was never sure if they added syrup or not.
Awful Awful = just like a cabinet, only made with unflavored ice milk and lots of syrup, and only available at Newport Creamery.
Fribble = what those Massachusetts people call an Awful Awful, from that RIP OFF of Newport Creamery called Friendly's. And does FRIENDLY'S give you a free one if you drink three in a row? I THINK NOT. Doesn't sound too friendly to me.

YMMV.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

More and more confused!

[samantha2074.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure the English language has enough dignity to be offended.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

True... that whore has left the barn, so to speak.

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

a. "Tree lawn" is part of my vocabulary, but my parents both spent some of their formative years in Cleveland. This is probably why I was rejected from an accent study being done on campus, when I applied as a representative of New England.

b. It is scary that Bloomington is "the City" to a lot of people around here. Kids were posting on bloomington about how sad they were to be away from all this excitement for Thanksgiving break.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

"Tree lawn" also seems to have some adherents in the coastal Northeast, more than would be explained by simple diffusion, given the relative paucity for some of the other alternatives such as "parking". But I clearly didn't get it from there.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Reading these surveys, I actually notice more and more cases in which my reaction is "I said this when I was little, but later taught myself to say that because nobody said it the other way any more" (e.g. "garage sale"/"yard sale"). And then on the map I find that usage 1 is more Great Lakes and usage 2 is more mid-Atlantic. At the time I think I just assumed it was a change of fashion, or that my previous speech had been in error.

Many of the category-1 usages were probably not so much things I had heard as a three-year-old near Cleveland, as they were things I had learned from my parents in Virginia after they had lived in various places around the Midwest, the last of which was near Cleveland.

I picked up very few distinctly Southern usages. In northern Virginia there were always these very distinct populations of people who talked like Southerners and people who didn't, and I actually lived right on the border between regions in which each was the majority, but I tended to identify with the non-Southerners (without really making any value judgments about it). But I wasn't conscious at all of slowly migrating from a Great Lakes dialect toward a more Eastern one, though people would tell me I had an accent that they couldn't place.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

OK, that sounds incredibly bigoted and snobbish. I was trying to say that I had nothing against the people with Southern accents. Whatever.

[kerri9494.livejournal.com]

But, but, but...a garage sale takes place in the garage, and a yard sale takes place in the yard!

And a rummage sale takes place where one has neither a garage or a yard.

It ain't me, &c.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A rummage sale is what it looks like when the tax man comes to the door.