mmcirvin: (Default)
mmcirvin ([personal profile] mmcirvin) wrote2003-12-02 07:00 pm

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.

[identity profile] chicken-cem.livejournal.com 2003-12-03 02:05 am (UTC)(link)
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".

[identity profile] plorkwort.livejournal.com 2003-12-03 03:35 am (UTC)(link)
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 [livejournal.com profile] bloomington about how sad they were to be away from all this excitement for Thanksgiving break.

[identity profile] mmcirvin.livejournal.com 2003-12-03 04:35 am (UTC)(link)
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.