Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic If You Speak American English...

70% General American English
10% Midwestern
10% Yankee
5% Dixie
5% Upper Midwestern

I think that 5% upper midwestern is from refering to soda as pop, which is what I grew up saying, but now that I live lower in the states, I say soda, like all the other normal people around me...

James

Rolling houses -- We did it as an initiation thing for freshman who played soccer. So first, we rolled their houses, then we came to get them at around 4 am, got them all dressed up in various hiddeous costumes, took them out to breakfast, and then took them to school. It was great fun :p .

Actually, we got arrested for breaking cerfew one of those nights . . . We stopped at an all night grocery store in North Royalton to buy more toilet paper . And all they said after they drove us to the police station was, "Go back to Parma and have fun. Stay out of North Royalton."

Thanks, Lynn. I knew the term Yankee, but had no idea about Dixie.

Well said, LabRat

See ya,
AnnaBtG.

But see, therein lies the magic of our English. You can give a character a whole lot of definition simply by the words you choose to put in his or her mouth.

"Hey, hon," the waitress said, giving her gum a loud snap. "Whatcha want to drink?"

"What do you have?" the young man asked, flipping the menu over looking for a list of beverages and failing to find more than the daily specials.

"Coffee and coke."

Coffee? Ugh, it was ninety degrees in the shade.

"Um, all right," he said, not looking forward to the sickly sweet soda but so thirsty he'd pretty much drink spit if that's all they had that was wet. "Guess I'll have a Coke."

"What flavor?"

Now, from reading the above, I know that the scene is set in the south and the young man is not from the south. All because northerners and midwesterners don't refer to all carbonated beverages as "coke" even though southerners do.



Lynn

Yeah, really what we need is a list of terms you'd never use, no matter where in the US you lived. In fact, that quiz was helpful in this regard, precisely because some of my Brit terms weren't listed as options. So, I now know (well, I knew before, but I'm using this as an example) that no-one in the US calls carbonated drinks soft drinks.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - we need a US/UK dictionary!

Yvonne

Waving hand frantically...

I do, Yvonne! I've been known to ask in a restaurant "What soft drinks do you have?" as often as "What kind of soda?" Is it the Canadian in me?

Kathy

Like Yvonne, I was curious. My scores are a bit different to hers and LabRat's, though, which I put down to being raised in the South West of England. (By the way, it took me years to stop using the word 'dap' to mean 'trainers'... or, in line with the quiz, 'sneakers'. Very West Country, that word. )

H'm. Probably ought to have left the sneakers question blank. And the soda question. (Soft drinks! Thanks, Yvonne! That's the term that had slipped out of my brain.)

I did leave the easy course question out, though had they offered Mickey Mouse Course I might have been tempted to check that option. Anyway...

45% General American English
35% Yankee
15% Dixie
0% in the other categories.

Interesting, really, that I can get any kind of score, given that I have only ever spent two weeks in the US, and that was some 18 years ago.

Chris

Me too! I call it soda for everything else, but on the restaurant menus, they usually list them as "soft drinks," so that's what always comes out of my mouth when I inquire.

JD

I suspect soft drink is a generic term used nationally. Everyone knows what it is, but don't necessarily use it when speaking.

While Coke may be used regionally, people can get really confused by it, so it rarely appears in written form unless the reference is actually to Coca-Cola. But then, most of the time, the menus will print Coca-Cola with the Coke logo.

As a side issue, Coca-Cola Co. gets really upset when people use "Coke" generically to refer to any soft drink. Trademarks are everything, so companies avoid getting their products classified as generic to the point where Coca-Cola Co. will send ringers into a restaurant and ask for a Coke. If they get anything else but Coke, out come the lawyers. This is why a server is taught to say, "How about a Pepsi?" or something similar if they don't actually have Coke products. It's to prevent being sued.

Just ask Kleenex how they feel about being generic.

Companies actually will spend millions of dollars on research to find a name that means absolutely nothing in every language on earth. That way, they can more easily avoid being labeled generic. For example, Esso discovered that there is no language that uses two X's together in a word. So came the name change from Esso to Exxon.

For those who are curious, I use the term, "soda".

Didn't we have a thread on this very subject at some point?

Yes, I know, it's sad, but we did! I'm (almost) sure of it.

LabRat

Indeed, Lab. I've been thinking about that thread myself. It was started here and then revamped here .

Paul

Well.. I'm Canadian but I was curious how I would test...
I had to leave a couple blanks too but my results were
50% General American English
15% Upper Midwestern
15% Yankee
5% Dixie
5% Midwestern

I don't work out in sneakers or tennis shoes. I wear runners.
And if I take an easy course, it's a bird course.

Allie

Good thing you live in Greece, Anna:
You'd be in trouble here Yankees are North of the Mason-Dixon line and Dixie speakers are South of the Mason-Dixon line. We have such a short history, the Civil War of 1860 is still burned in our minds.

As for TP-ing a house: It is a common Halloween ritual spread to other just because days. Tipping over out-houses was popular, but with indoor plumbing now, that's harder to do. Also popular with teens is stealing road sign posts, particularly if the street name is their name.
Edit: when lynn said she "rolled trees" I visualized her rolling logs on the lawn like a lumberjack. We call it toilet papering or TP-ing, never rolling. When my kids were teenagers, our front trees got it a lot. My kids had to clean up, because it was their friends who did it!

As for an easy class, I have heard it called a gut but never used the term myself since I didn't take any. Not if you want to get through physics in 4 years.

My scores:
65% General American English
15% Dixie
10% Upper Midwestern
5% Midwestern
5% Yankee
This makes sense because I was raised in California by parents from Minnesota. I had many friends originally from the south while I was in school. But in my neck of the woods, y'all isn't really understood.

I remember a rather large discussion on Pop, Soda and Coke. I was brought up on Pop or Soda, but use Coke even though I drink Pepsi

Here's something very Upper Midwestern: Anyone remember the white margarine that came in a bag with a color pill? You squished the pill inside the bag and massaged it through the margarine to make it look like butter. My California eyes had never seen anything like it until I visited the family in Minnesota. The dairy industry made this a law so that margarine could be visually distinguised from butter. To those who may not know what margarine is - butter is from cows, margarine is from a chemical plant.

Artemis

Tsk. You didn't follow my link , hmm? Although less than 6% is a pretty small fraction . . .

I've lived in different parts of the country, so it's no surprise my speech came out this way:

55% General American
20% Dixie
10% Upper Mid-Western
10% Yankee
5% Mid-Western

Some comments:

I've never heard an easy class called any of the choices. As best I can recall, we called it a class for jocks.

I pronounce route both ways but didn't have that choice. Don't know why I choose what I choose, but I would say State root 60, and follow this rowt to get to the school.

I spent the first 20 years of my life in the south, and a coke was a coke. Anything else was a cold drink. Now I say pop.

And CC, caramel pronounced care a mel is a song by Suzanne Vega. But it's CAR mul apples and CAR mul corn.

Jude

Thanks for the link, Paul. That was a fun thread. And interesting.

LabRat

My varsity basketball team TPed our coach's house during the night after our last home game. We actually managed to grab a 'no parking' sign, cement block and all, among other things from various construction sites around the county. Don't ask how -- I think it took our entire starting lineup just to lift it. And traffic cones! Ahh, for the love of traffic cones.... The act of TPing itself was just the frosting/icing on the cake. Anyways, after our lovely act of decoration, we sped off, exhilarated, only to find out the next morning we'd hit the wrong house. Suffice it to say we never tried again.

Like Anna, I was curious. These are my results:

45% Yankee
30% General American English
15% Dixie
5% Upper Midwestern
0% Midwestern


I'm surprised about the 45% Yankee. I thought I would get a higher score for General American English.

Elena

I've gotten such a kick out of all the caramel vs carmel (seriously?) information you very nice people have provided.

I went back and retook the quiz. When I changed that one answer from three syllables to two, I was suddenly 5% less Dixie and 5% Upper Midwestern.

So, now I know exactly who to blame for that 'drop out the A' thing.

Not too long ago I was able to meet some genuine FoLCs. Real people with faces and voices, if you can imagine such a thing. Therefore, many different accents.

And the one that really stood out for me was that MidWestern 'Oh, we don't have any accent at all' accent.

Yeah, right. Then where's your 'A', people? Hmmmmm?

CC

Oh yeah, the 'Accent Convention'.

But there we had two MidWesterners. "Don't you think we have the same accent?" Lynn asked us of Kathy and herself. "Um... you each sound completely different," replied we non-North Americans.


Wendy (who just loved hearing CC say y'all )