Re: Regionalisms

[Jan Birney <stmark6614@YAHOO.COM>]

I just listened to NPR's Talk of the Nation today and
their topic was Accents in America.  I caught the last
few minutes of the program but it intrigued me because
it reminded me of an article I read in Yankee Magazine
about twenty years ago.  The article talked about
regional speech and dialects.  There was a quiz that
was quite comprehensive and that claimed to be able to
pinpoint exactly where the quiz-taker was from--right
down to the county in some cases.  It was fascinating.
 I'm from Southern New England, about an hour from New
York City.  Our speech patterns and word choices don't
fit the typical "New Yawhk" accents.  Nor do we have
the typical New England use of "wuuhds".
I always thought that my speech patterns and choice of
words was fairly standard--until our family moved to
St. Louis, Missouri several years ago where I received
a little lesson in humility.  One Sunday morning my
husband went to a local 7-11 and asked for "hard
rolls", which make great egg sandwiches and are also
great with cold cuts (probably another regionalism).
The clerk looked at my husband in all seriousness and
said, "Of course not--why would we have  hard rolls?
All of our rolls are strictly fresh."  It took a while
for us to adapt to our new environment, but soon we we
eating Kaiser rolls with our eggs and lunch meat and
we learned to enjoy frozen custard on hot summer days
(tastes remarkably like soft-serve ice cream) and
celebrated, with cake, the day we were "barn".  I
never got used to "warshing" the clothes in the
"zink", however, nor did I ever shop for "grosheries".


Linguistically enriched, I am,
Jan Birney


=====
Jan Birney, Computer Specialist
Stratford Catholic Regional School System
Stratford, CT 06615
stmark6614@yahoo.com
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