I enjoyed taking this survey, "How Y'all, Youse and You Guys Talk," from the New York Times' Upshot Blog. You answer 25 questions, mostly about what you call certain things and how you pronounce certain words, and it tells you where you're from. I think there's something to it. When I was done, it said the cities most closely matching my dialect are Grand Rapids, Michigan; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Minneapolis/St. Paul. (I've lived in the Twin Cities area my whole life.) Of my 25 answers, the ones that apparently go the farthest toward placing me in the upper Midwest are my word for something that is diagonally across two streets ("kitty-corner") and the word for a sugary, carbonated beverage ("pop"). I think I've noticed that, in the South, any pop is a Coke, in the same way that around here any tissue can be a kleenex, even if it's a Puffs. The places with the dialects most unlike mine are in the South: Richmond and Norfolk, Virginia, and Birmingham, Alabama. The distinguishing traits here seem to be less what things are called and more how they're pronounced. The first syllable of lawyer I pronounce to rhyme with boy; the women who married my parents' brothers are my aunts, but, instead of pronouncing their title as it's spelled, I make them sound like social insects. You know what's weird? If talking, I'd certainly refer to my Aunt (pronounced ant) Karen. But if reading aloud, like at night to young children, I think I might very well say it like it's spelled, almost as if the way the word looks on the page persuades me I'm "wrong."
My relatives put me in mind of another of the 25 survey items—the difference between "dinner" and "supper." With me, it's not time of day: the meals go breakfast, lunch, supper, and there is no "dinner." If, however, a meal is large enough, and formal enough, like on a holiday, it attains the status of "dinner," no matter when it's served. But I know this is not how it was on the farm my mom grew up on in far south-central Minnesota. They ate all the time, because I think farming then was a lot of physical labor, and the meals went breakfast, lunch, dinner, lunch, supper. Dinner, around 1 in the afternoon, wasn't formal but it was big and hot—roasts, mashed potatoes, overcooked vegetables, all sorts of bizarre things done with jello. Supper was usually leftovers from dinner. Lunch, served in midmorning and again midafternoon, was sandwiches and some selection of bars, cookies, cake, and pie, always with a lot of coffee. The men worked outside all day and the women worked in the kitchen all day. The women got stout.
I was captivated by this item from the survey: What do you call a drive-through liquor store? The options are:
brew thru
party barn
bootlegger
beer barn
beverage barn
we have these but no special word for them
I have never heard of such a thing
I've heard of such a thing but I guess for a Minnesotan the last choice is the most accurate. I love the poetic names, the rhyming "brew thru" and the alliterative "beer barn," which seems superior to the polysyllabic "beverage barn," though that's not bad either. Everything that's unfamiliar is attractive to me. I can't tell a Boston accent from a Brooklyn one but I know I love listening to both, and better yet would be a southern drawl if it weren't associated in my mind with the sounds made by, for example, Lindsey Graham.
A woman I used to do business with grew up in the Appalachian part of Ohio, and from her I learned "yens," the southeastern Ohio equivalent of "you guys" or "y'all." I guess it's a contraction of "ye ones." She said when she first moved to Minnesota she thought everyone sounded like Bob Dylan. Another oddity was how, at the end of a transaction, the clerk would say to her, "There you go." Her view was that it was more passive aggressive fake niceness. I say "there you go." Now you make my words true. We're done, get out of here!
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