A Facebook friend shared an interesting diversion that promised to identify one's geographic and demographic roots through dialect. I approached with a bit of suspicion. As I do those seemingly innocent exercises shared on Facebook asking you to choose something, as in "one has to go" tied to breakfast foods, hamburger toppings or retailer logos. Answering, you are sharing consumer preferences with targeted ads soon on their way.
A recent one was especially annoying: "Does anyone still eat cornbread dressing?" Still? We never stopped, though our family recipe calls for equal parts of cornbread, cooked white rice and ample amounts of crumbled Jimmy Dean sage sausage and sauteed green onion.
Another is "Would you live here?" attached to a cabin in a Walden Pond scene. When can I start packing?
But this language-tied-to-geography exercise was sponsored by the New York Times, providing a level of credence. The headline was intriguing: "How Y'all, Youse and You Guys Talk."
I chuckled at those three colloquial pronouns, as I recalled my daughter Laura, then 4 years old, running out to the deck of the house in Connecticut during our corporate layover there in the 1980s.
"Come on over, y'all guys" she shouted to her buddies down the hill. My wife Linda and I looked at each other, rolled eyes and chuckled. Our Conroe, Texas-born child was being Yankee-fied!
The cultural exchange continued. Months later, we flew down to Louisiana for a family visit. Sunday mornings at my boyhood home often included traditional donuts (not beignets) and orange juice before church. When Laura bounced into the kitchen and saw the donuts, she called out to her sisters still sleeping, "Grandfather's got bagels!"
My father winced, then drawled: "Ted, how's that transfer to the Houston office coming along? You really need to get these kids back down South."
The divining questions in the Times word puzzle, if you will allow that description, are based on the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Dr. Bert Vaux, a Houston native now affiliated with King's College in the United Kingdom, and Scott Golder, a data scientist. I find it ironic that Vaux, a U.S.-born academic having thoroughly researched American dialects, is now across the pond in the land of George Bernard Shaw, that British playwright credited (perhaps incorrectly) with the quip "Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language." Vaux and Golder have shown us that it takes but one nation to be divided by language. Our own.
Building on Vaux's extensive research, Josh Katz, a graphics designer for the Times, created a quiz based on more than 350,000 survey responses collected in 2013. Katz's methodology and maps provide a precise set of darts on a map identifying the respondent's linguistic roots. I took the quiz. My resulting personalized map was eerily correct.
Even with some of my answers being augmented from living elsewhere in the U.S. with work -- for example, I use "soda" for carbonated beverages rather than the Southern "soft drink" of my youth -- my map was an accurate scalene triangle anchored by New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Jackson, the longest side of it running from the French Quarter up to the Mississippi state capital passing directly through my home parish north of Lake Pontchartrain.
There were some dead giveaways in my answers, but kudos to the researchers for catching such specific words: "Neutral grounds" meaning a boulevard median and of course "poor-boy" for a long sandwich are uniquely New Orleanian. My other, more traditional Southern responses, including "y'all," edged me closer to the Mississippi state line, steps away from where I was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana.
I always knew my social and linguistic roots were from the gumbo of ancestral lands. I figure my figures of speech are geographically centered at the north toll plaza of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway.
Yet, New Orleans' patois is rather easy to spot. Like Brooklynese. However, my friend's results were even more surgically accurate. I never considered there'd be such differing clues in dialect among large Southeast cities like Birmingham, Montgomery and Atlanta. Though having much of his working life influenced by Atlanta, his results bulls-eyed two specific Birmingham neighborhoods where he grew up.
All this considered, I mused about these outrageous conspiracy theories of late and how truly ridiculous they are. Why on earth would Big Government, Big Pharma or Bill Gates need to trouble with implanting microchips in your vaccine, since playwright Shaw's astute Professor Henry Higgins figured out how to track you more than a century ago? Merely open your mouth to speak and you give your location away.