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