Monday, June 30, 2008

How am I not divorced?

If you were paying attention, I posted up the map of soda/pop/Coke the other day.  You'll also agree with me, I'm sure, that the correct term is "pop", and the rest of the country can go to hell.  Well, this site has a list of hundreds of dialect differences across areas of the U.S.  In comparing Wisconsin with New Jersey, you can see how people from New Jersey tend to use the wrong vowel sounds, in addition to their insistence on using the wrong words or pronunciations for common items.  Here are a few examples from the study:

In NJ, you eat care-a-mel candy, while in WI we eat car-ml candy.  How inefficient is that third syllable?  In NJ, they go to great lengths (and love to rub your face in the fact) that Mary/merry/marry have distinct vowel sounds, while in WI we are much more efficient in simply pronouncing them all the same (look, there is a reason that context matters).  NJ people wear sneakers but in WI we put on our tennis shoes.  People in NJ can be catty-corner from you, but we know that the correct term is kitty-corner.  In WI, we can use either dinner or supper with equal ease, but in NJ they are too rigid to use the word supper at all.  And of course, in NJ you'd get a drink at the water fountain, which is a waste of extra syllables when you can just say bubbler.   And while the study doesn't seem to indicate this is a problem, from personal experience I can tell you that in NJ they somehow climb up on top of the other people and wait "on line", when we all know that you are actually waiting "in line".

And every night I have to listen to this kind of Apache spoken in my own house.  I hope I can save the girls before they are on line with their sneakers, waiting to get mAAArried to the guy who live catty-corner from them in college and took them out to dinner (but not supper!) before ordering car-A-MEL for dessert.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Where the heck did you grow up?! I drink water from a water fountain and like to call my fizzy water drink a soda. Only along Lake Michigan do they talk funny...like you do.