Have you been filling bottles with gasoline and creating malaise?
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That's a big negatory on the bottles of gasoline and a definite maybe on creating malaise, but only on those who find differing views upsetting. I also come from a long and storied line of "good ol boys", I lost the accent long ago but I can still talk the talk. :cool:
My daughter specializes in language.
Just a few years ago, my uncle came by here to visit for a few weeks. He arrived speaking a sorta-Midland accent and vocabulary. My own accent is a mishmash of Southern California/PNW accents.
She observed with horror that after spending a day chatting with each other and telling old family stories, we had both reverted to the Appalachian speech patterns of our youth.
She's one to complain, I never know what accent she'll step off the plane with when she comes to visit. Last time it was very Welsh, though to be fair she had just been in Wales for months, speaking Welsh.
Some people are accent sponges and others never ever lose theirs. My MIL lived in this country for 60 years and sounded just as Glaswegian when she died as she when she first set foot in this country. I, in fact, am known to use many of her Scottish expressions.. I check my "line" when I leave the supermarket, I'll say an agitated person as "up to high doh;" if I'm happy with something I might say I'm "fair pleased." The dialect is so cool and musical I can't resist co-opting it from time to time.
In general, it's annoying when people adopt an accent too quickly--it seems fake, but I think sometimes it's a way to connect with and integrate in the community.
Alan, I'm always fascinated by how many Southern accents there are. There's Texas, and Louisiana, and Georgia, and Tennessee--all variations on the theme. Dave Ramsey said that went he went to radio, he had to get a speech coach to mitigate his accent.
Personally, I don't have an accent. :)
Is there a rocky mountain accent? Other than the New England area and the cheese heads, I don't pick up regional accents at all. I have friends who are refugees from Iowa and I can't detect any mid-western accent.
I had a college professor tell me I had one of the most "godawful" New England accents he had ever heard. I do know that I use R's after vowels very sparingly.
I’m from Michigan, suburban Detroit. I’m told I have the Michigan twang and even after almost 30 years in the Chicago area, I still have it. I definitely don’t sound like the folks born here, even those from the suburbs.
I can pick up accents from different areas of Texas. Fort Worth twang is quite different from other regions. Other than saying y'all every once in a while, my long time in Texas left no clue. Old timer western Coloradans also have a particular way of speaking which I like.
If you live long enough, you can notice shifting patterns too. Especially when you’ve been away from an area. It seems to me that Chicago-speak has been gradually colonizing Southern Wisconsin over the last thirty years or so.
Considering the small size of the Northeast relative to the rest of the country, we do have a surprising number of detectable accents. Besides the obvious rosa/Boston accent(s), There's a Maine/New Hampshire accent (I was in the play Our Town, so I know), and there is a separate Vermont accent. Everyone knows the NJ accent which thank God my kids never picked up, and New Yawk/Lawn Geyeland and then there's a PA/MD accent ("on" is "awn").
I have been told many times since I moved to New Mexico that I have a weird accent from Michigan, lol!
Now the accent from a Burqueno, that's weird!
https://youtu.be/IucBp1yrr7A?si=2aouQYZiUzL4PMBx
We called it "pop" at home in Washington state. Most of the families in our town migrated from the Dust Bowl.
They’ve mapped that one out.
https://archive.nytimes.com/ideas.bl...da-vs-pop-map/
I didn't know Europeans hate root beer. Grew up in Pgh. PA said pop, Phila. people in college said soda, down here in Maryland they say drink, I think. I am not out much anymore...
Root beer is disgusting
When I was a little kid, one of the biggest treats of all was climbing into the Country Squire and going to a drive-in called Dog n Suds. They had great foot longs, bag-staining fries, and the best root beer I ever had. You could even get it in two gallon jugs so you could make floats for days afterward.
I once had a very old recipe for root beer using actual roots and herbs. Seem like there was licorice, sassafras, molasses, and what all, that I scrounged in health food stores. For carbonation you added a bit of yeast and capped the bottles. There was a brief period when the sugars and yeast allowed just the right carbonation to taste a few bottles, before they all over pressurized and blew up. It was a fun experiment and the flavor was unique.
I've seen some connoisseur type root beer brands around.
Yes, I came from a "pop" state.
Michigan was pop, but when I moved to Chicago in 96, I had to change to soda. No one I knew here said pop and they were confused by it. LOL
Then there are party stores. A true MI thing.
It was tonic growing up, which I guess was a regional weirdness. Almost nobody says that any more. I think most people around here now call it soda.