DIALECTICS

Kristopher links an interesting quiz on regional dialects. Mine is rather mixed and constantly changing, having grown up predominantly in the South or Texas but having moved quite frequently. I no longer refer to carbonated soft drinks as “cokes” for example.

FILED UNDER: Popular Culture,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. joy says:

    Other regionalism’s I’ve come across…

    For a sandwich (lunch meat, cheese, etc.) on a hard roll…submarine sandwich, hero, hoagie, and grinder. And that’s just the variations on the east coast.

    for a plastic shopping bag, I’ve heard it refered to as a “sack”.

    Up here in Vermont, they call vacation homes or what some would call a cabin, “camps”.

  2. Meezer says:

    In Hoosierland, if we want to go to the basement, we go, “down cellar”. “If you want ice cream you’ll have to go down cellar and get it from the freezer.”

  3. JAMES!! Next you’re going to be telling us that you’ve stopped calling the thing you push around the aisles of the grocery store a “buggy”!

  4. Don Young says:

    What else is there except cokes?

  5. jen says:

    Don, those things are sodas…Coke is a brand name of a specific soda. 😉

    What I found interesting from my time in New England is the difference between a milkshake and frappe.

  6. Paul says:

    Ladies and Gentlemen… I’m from New Orleans….

    You folks don’t even know regionalism.

    Just look at our baked goods….

    We have an Italian sandwich, that almost everyone says was invented by a frenchmen, called a muffaletta, it is served on round bread.

    We have “French Bread” which we usually get from an Italian barkery. It is a long skinny loaf so it is often called… “Long Bread”

    Now if you make a sandwich on long bread that is called a “Poboy.” (Unless you put oysters on it in which case it can be an “oyster poboy” or an “oyster loaf” either is acceptable.)

    However if you don’t make your poboy the day the bread is baked it goes stale so often we cut it thin, soak it in egg and then fry it. Some people call this french toast but in New Orleans is usually called “lost bread” as the bread was lost anyway. It also goes by the name “Pain Perdu.” (Which is ‘lost bread’ translated into French to further confuse foreigners.)

    Or you make a bread pudding with the unusable loaf. On top of that you put a “Hard Sauce” which is not as firm as the name implies, it gets its name because it is loaded with Hard Liquor. (Whiskey or Rum usually)

    But the ‘dough madness’ does not end there.

    For about 3 months out the year local bakeries (especially the Italian ones) made a cake loosely modeled after a traditional French pastry. We call it a “King Cake.” The King Cake is not like a birthday or wedding cake, it is more like a coffee cake and is shaped sorta like what you would get if you took 3 bicycle inner-tubes and braiding them together before baking them in an oval. The King Cake has a plastic baby doll in side that will chip a tooth if you are not careful. We have special parties just to eat such cakes. If you get the piece of cake with the baby you have to buy the next cake for everyone at the party.

    And folks… That is just what we do weird with flour and yeast.. Don’t get me started on the rest of the things we do…

    And they Texas is like a whole other country

    Paul