I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me. ~
If you have had the opportunity to travel from sea to shining sea and from the Canadian border down to the Gulf of Mexico, you may have encountered a comprehension issue. In this country. With English speakers.
Obviously this isn’t news. I was raised in West Tennessee, and I can tell you that the dialect was different even 15 miles away. I have cousins who moved from Tennessee to Michigan when they were quite small and their ways of talking are nowhere near ours. Not anymore. I’m sure you also have cousins whose ways of speaking are different than yours.
However, there’s also an issue with vocabulary, strangely enough. Totally apart from the changes Webster has accepted over the last ten years, there are words used in the south that baffle people born elsewhere. Cattywampus (out of whack). Lightning bugs (fireflies). Snake doctors (dragon flies). Buggies (grocery carts). Goober (someone silly or odd).
That said, we don’t have the market cornered on that. My husband was born and raised in the northeast, and I learned new words every week the first few years we were married. No, not THOSE words. Roll (no, not a dinner roll, a hamburger bun). Sneakers (tennis shoes). Pie (pizza).
However, the differences are much greater than those outlined above. There is enough diversity to provide Josh Katz sufficiently robust material to write a book on the topic, Speaking American. Someone gave me this book years ago and it has provided hours of entertainment and food for thought.
But wait; you don’t have to think if that kind of exercise is painful for you. Sigh. I’ll summarize. The book consists of visuals–heat maps of the U.S. that reflect what words are primarily used in certain parts of the country and/or how certain words are pronounced. To illustrate, take a look at the columns below to get a flavor for the assortment of words used and the way a word might be pronounced.
Meaning/pronunciation
- 3 syllables in Caramel
- 2 syllables in Caramel
- Garbage can
- Trash can
- Kitty-corner
- Catty-corner
- Been (said as Ben)
- Been (said as Bin)
- Aunt as AHNT
- Aunt as Ant
Who does what in different parts of the United States
- In the SE, plus New England
- The rest of the country. What’s wrong with y’all?
- Most often used in the NW & east toward the Great Lakes
- Everywhere else
- NW skimming east along the northernmost states
- Almost everybody south of that
- From East WA east to the Atlantic (how do y’all do that?)
- Everywhere else
- MN, Dakotas, New England, parts of VA
- Everywhere else
The examples given are but a drop in the bucket of words and terms explored. And in case you’re wondering whether the research was credible, there were over 350,000 individual respondents. I think that’s a decent sampling. If you don’t care to invest in a copy of your own, check your local library. Mine has it and yours might, too.
There are other oddities I’m really curious about, but haven’t yet found books that address them. One is along the language trajectory. For example, why do Brits use a ‘u’ when spelling color and valor? And why is their vocabulary so very different from ours? Is it our melting pot? That would certainly explain the difference in the accent; can we lay the blame for vocabulary oddities there, too?
There are a LOT of them. Bonnet (hat in the U.S.; hood of car in Britain), homely (not flattering in the U.S.; means cozy in Britain), geezer (insult in the U.S., but not so much in Britain). It is no wonder that the last time I visited across the pond, I did not appear to be making sense to fellow commuters on the underground. Many thanks to our British cousin, Pat Long, for translating.
The other topic I would love for someone else to write a book on is the regional differences in food. My husband needs red cabbage with pot roast and applesauce with pork. Not me. Some areas of the country add oysters to stuffing, but here–for the most part–we make cornbread dressing and there won’t be any seafood within a mile of it.
Speaking of cornbread, bacon grease is the fat used to make this at my house and sugar is unnecessary. In other places, the prevailing opinion is that cornbread isn’t edible without sugar. (If you want cake, go buy cake. Or I’ll make you some.) Further, there’s this thing about what to call milk that isn’t buttermilk. When I was a kid, and for decades after, I called that sweet milk, but it doesn’t have sugar in it. This caused a bit of a hiccup for one of my midwestern friends, Susan.
While she and her husband were camping with another couple, they decided to make biscuits using the recipe on the back of the Martha White flour bag. (Note that that brand is a product of the south.) One of the ingredients required was sweet milk. How would Susan know that she didn’t need a special kind of milk? Or that she absolutely didn’t need sugar? So many opportunities to explore so many differences in appetites and meanings and their origins.
At this point, though, those questions are curiosities for me, not thesis components. And the next time I hear something I don’t understand, I’ll just assume the best without assuming I understand completely.
You?
This is a subject that has always fascinated me being from a different country. For a long time, after coming to the U.S., my friends made fun of me for using “whilst” instead of “while” among other things.
I don’t remember you ever saying anything the rest of us didn’t say, but you may have been in the states a very long time before I met you. Anyway, words and regional differences fascinate me, too.