It’s not “BoliVAR”! “It’s Boliverr,” I wanted to say, but I bit my tongue and the meeting went on.
Ironically, I heard the mispronunciation of the Missouri (that’s Missour-ee not Missour-uh) city the morning after I had looked at a piece on businessinsider.com headlined “22 States That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently from Each Other.”
Well, duh.
Of course we don’t speak English exactly the same. We are getting pretty homogenized, but apparently plenty of diff erences remain.
This interesting piece popped up on my Facebook feed, initially from my cousin who grew up in Oklahoma. He thought the study was pretty much right on.
After going through the 22 maps, I challenged that.
That’s the great thing about Facebook: You fi nd interesting items you might never discover if you had to troll the Internet for them. I don’t have time to go trolling, but I can take a quick spin through Facebook. There’s a lot of nonsense on there – and people who repost it often get blocked from my feed.
This study, however, is educational. I promise.
The maps posted on this site were created by Joshua Katz, a doctoral student in statistics at North Carolina State University. He has taken information from professors Bert Vaux and Scott Golder’s linguistic survey. My map geek friends swooned, they were so excited.
The survey is not just about how we pronounce words, but what words we use, like crawdad. That’s the favored word in the northwest quadrant of Arkansas, so says the survey, but head to our border with Louisiana and the study found “crawfi sh” was the preferred word. In the northeastern U.S. and along the Canadian border as far west as North Dakota, it’s “crayfi sh.”
What do you call that brown, sweet, chewy concoction you can melt and dip apples in? I call it “car-ml,” the preferred pronunciation for this part of the state. Folks in the southeast corner of Arkansas then east to the Atlantic Ocean pronounce it “carra-mel.” I’ve tried that pronunciation but it just doesn’t roll off my tongue, kind of like the candy itself.
Apparently, two-thirds of the country pronounces “lawyer” as “loyer.” I don’t think I have ever heard anyone pronounce it “loyer”, and I know a lot of loyers.
Roundabouts — you know those things cars go round and round on — are called traft c circles in some parts of the country. I call them accidentswaiting-to-happen.
Remember those things that hang on the wall and dispense water? We call them water fountains and some folks call them drinking fountains. But in two small areas of the country — Rhode Island and eastern Wisconsin — they are called bubblers. I don’t know why, but I kind of like that, so I think I will start calling them bubblers. People will think I am a cheese head.
The survey asked participants what they called the weather event when it rains at the same time the sun shines. Apparently, most of the country calls it nothing, although there are pockets in Florida, the Northeast and Minnesota that refer to this as a sun shower. That’s sweet.
However, some folks in Alabama and Mississippi call this the devil beating his wife.
Apparently, they don’t see it from the same perspective as people in Florida and Minnesota.
As long as I can remember I have heard a forecast to go with this phenomenon: when the sun shines while it is raining, it means it will rain at the same time the following day. I have done an unscientific survey of this old wives’ tale and it seems to be true more often than not.
I like sun shower. That devil thing makes me uncomfortable. I am going to call it a sun shower — if I can remember it.
Here’s the thing that really made by head spin: the alleged pronunciations of pecan. According to this study, I should pronounce it “PEE-kahn.” In fact, I pronounce it more like “pick-ahn,” like folks from New York.
I don’t know why. Maybe I was a New Yawker in a past life.
Frankly, all of this language has made me thirsty.
Just pass me a sweetened, carbonated beverage.
You know, a pop (northern plains westward). Or a soda (California and the Northeast). But not a coke (the South).
Make it, as my family says, a soda pop.
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