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.