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My favorite of these, which unfortunately I didn’t grow up there to experience it first hand, is that in Minnesota and Wisconsin some people call doing donuts in your car “whipping shitties”.
Who the fuck cares lmaoo
John’s Beetles.
We had an issue in my college town in the Midwest. Someone almost got expelled because he called out loudly a ground squirrel, which in his local town they called… Squinnies.
This was in college, which hosts many Asian students and he did it in front of them. I believe his phrasing was pointing in a general area and yelling something like “look at all the squinnies”.
Now, to many it could definitely be misheard as “squinties” a derogatory term. He got into a lot of hot water and if I remember correctly, a professor who studied local dialects actually knew the term and was able to save him.
A friend of mine had a similar problem when he, a Brit, was studying in the States. He was in the smoking area of a gay bar, when he asked a friend “shall I chuck this cigarette in the bin, or what?” (I.e. “are you going to come over here to take a drag of this cigarette before it’s over, or should I throw it away?”). Unfortunately, a common British slang word for cigarette is also a slur for gay people (it is a slur in the UK too, but the cigarette slang word is common enough that if someone hears the F word, they are far less likely to assume it’s in a slur context)
On the bright side, apparently my friend hooked up with the guy who punched him, after my friend admonished him for being so rude as to punch a person in a country without free healthcare. Apparently Southern English accent gets you far in the States
after my friend admonished him for being so rude as to punch a person in a country without free healthcare.
That is hilarious or sad or both.
In other news, having learned English mostly with 90s New York rap, including all the slurs luckily not in use anymore, I was shocked to read LotR in English and see what (or rather, who) Gandalf asked Pippin to throw on the fire in the Inn in Bree.
So you’re not going to tell us the phrase he actually said then? I’ll assume he was offering to have the ‘last suck on this fag’ At least he wasn’t asking to get the last cigarette for free, and therefore would be looking to ‘bum a fag’ All manner of confusion would ensue I’d assume, also being a Brit and I have never heard ‘fag’ being recognised as a slur here, it only means either cigarette or to do mundane tasks for older boys in public(private boarding) schools “oh Tarquin, have you heard? Simpkins is fagging for Fontleroy don’t you know?”
All manner of confusion would ensue I’d assume, also being a Brit and I have never heard ‘fag’ being recognised as a slur here
Might be an Americanisation thing, where it’s leaking over either from US media, or the internet.
a professor who studied local dialects actually knew the term and was able to save him
Lingua to the rescue!
I’ve always preferred the Cunning type over the Super type.
The town I grew up in has a longish name, most people in the area shorten it to just the first syllable with a y at the end, similar to how Philadelphia gets shortened to Philly
But there’s a slight difference between how the people who are from town pronounce it and how everyone else does and you can pretty reliably pick out the townies based on that.
Shibboleth!
I grew up in the center of Mississippi. I always called it “the devil is beating his wife”. Idk why it was ever called that because there was no story; it’s just how it is.
We had “the devil is beating his wife behind the kitchen door with a frying pan” and sometimes really old people would finish it with “on Sunday”
I seriously have no idea where the fuck this comes from, and it’s so weird and I love it
That’s an incredibly difficult map to decipher
It makes more sense when you have the background that most people don’t have a term for that.
Because of course that’s what you’re looking for at first. But yeah, I get that the “no term” data is actual positive data that they surveyed, and they want to make that distinct from “no survey data” but…
True
My mom, who grew up as the seventh generation of her family in Maryland, said “the devil is beating his wife.”
“Foxes getting married”
this feels like two students were having an argument and the one who said “everyone says the devil is beating his wife” lost by a lot
i was so confused when i visited a friend in kentucky and they were talking about the lightning bugs and how pretty they are.
they were dumbfounded when i had never heard of them; they talked for the rest of the day about how much awe i would be in once i saw them.
… they were fireflies. i had to pretend like it was the most amazing thing i had ever seen because i told them i hadnt even heard of them before.
Spawning my own enclave of ‘glitter bat’ users.
What up my glitter bat?
So we said both where I grew up
Chocolatine or pain au chocolat?
Then we have this little region who calls them croissant au chocolat…
At least pain/croissant au chocolat gives you an idea of what it is. Chocolatine? Sure, I’d assume that chocolate was involved, but I wouldn’t even be 100% on that.
I live in the country of the chocolatine so stop blaspheming immediately!!
/j
There’s a few “petit pain au chocolat” which is the best kind of technically correct. And right next to it the absolute most wrong: “petit pain”.
we didn’t call them anything because they don’t live here.
That’s true almost everywhere these days. Climate change and pesticides did a number on them.
I used to see hundreds floating around at night. Now I’m lucky to spot one a year.
Also, lovebugs. There were so many everywhere it was difficult to drive sometimes. I haven’t noticed any in years.
also those godsdamned grass lawns
And sometimes there’s a comparison to 50 years ago and there were 3 dozen different rare to semi-common linguistic variations for it back then. But somehow only this one small one didn’t get assimilated into the two prevailing ones. Makes you wonder what kind of secrets that town is up to.
I thought a glitter bat was a goth wearing colorful accessories.
how to pronounce “Appalachia” is a contentious subject. Harpers Ferry and south we say “App-uh-latch-(ee)-uh” (the ee is in parentheses because it’s such a small sound most wouldn’t hear it). north of harpers ferry they say “app-uh-lay-tcha”. then there’s one small town of mostly people descended from eastern Europeans who say it “app-uh-lack-(ee)-uh”. fun fact, tekking on YouTube, the manga reviewer, is one of those weirdos who are somehow both simultaneously the most wrong and less wrong than most northern Appalachians.
i mean come on, the name comes from the appalachee tribe, and the “lach” there is pronounced mere like “latch” than “laych.” at least with “lack” i can reason through that my Ukrainian friend can absolutely not say her "ch"s the way western Europeans do so if you have an insular community of people that pronunciation will stick.
Then there’s Belgium and The Netherlands, where the same words have straight up different meanings.
Mure mur mûr mur
you’ll run into that in latin america sometimes too, where some places a word is a delicious dish, and another the same word refers to testicles
“they’re the same picture”
