Mac n cheese all the way
I grew up in Texas, and I say catty-corner all the time.
We always said ma-maw and pa-paw.
another southern thing: down here one does not push or press a button (like in an elevator etc.) you mash that button. same deal with your car’s accelerator. not everyone says it, though. I think it’s dying out what with mass media pushing all this non-regional diction on us and years of depicting all southerners as idiots (which seems to be changing, thankfully.)
@twist Worshington and grocery buggies may be Appalachian words, they go through PA, is that the SW part? Worsh=wash is common in East Tennessee, and I hear buggy over in Middle TN and I think down in Georgia, too.
“Bubbler” is a (now-defunct) brand of drinking fountains which was made in Wisconsin. So it isn’t surprising that people (especially in Wisconsin, but elsewhere apparently) used it as a generic name. Cf. Xerox, Kleenex, etc.
That map might be more reflective of general cultural/historic homogeneity. The East Coast, with its large amount of European immigrants throughout the 19th and 20th centuries is littered with Omas, Opas, Babas and Diddles, while the midwest and west seem to adhere to the conventional grandma/grandpa. The southeast also has plenty of Abuelas and Abuelitas, of course, too, (though I’m a little surprised the southwest is just “grandma/grandpa” country).
My family’s grandparent-naming conventions are more-or-less random, based upon what the grandparent would like to be called along with what the cute li’l dickens of a grandkid first calls them. My mother’s mother was “Nana” to us, but since she remarried eight or nine times, we had a succession of Grandpas, culminating with Grandpa Pete and eventually Grandpa Paul (I never met any of the others). Because of her kinda strained relationship with her mother, I was surprised when my mom chose to be “Nana” to her own grandkids. The first two, however, called my parents “Grandma Peter and Grandpa Peter,” partly based upon what they called their other grandparents, and partly because “Petersen” was slightly too much of a mouthful. But to the rest of their twelve grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, my parents are Nana and Papa. (My dad always called his dad “Pappy,” so I asked him why he didn’t go by “Grandpappy” himself. He looked at me like I was crazy. I think he figured he’d sound like a minor character in Li’l Abner or Snuffy Smith or something.)
My inlaws go by Grandma and Grandpa, which suits Nana and Papa just fine, since they’d staked out their naming rights back in the late 70s, and my kids are Grandma and Grandpa’s first grandchildren. My sister’s kids call their paternal grandmother “Maga” because my nephew couldn’t properly pronounce “Grandma” when he was learning to talk, and the name just stuck. My other sister has grandkids who call my sister “Grammy” and her husband “Grampy” (Edit: FWIW, this sister’s family has lived in eastern Pennsylvania for the last 20 years or so. Other than my mother and her mother (both from St Louis), everyone else in this post are natives of Southern California.)
I can’t wait till my own kids have kids. I hope to have some input in my own appellation. “Honorable Grandfather” has some appeal. But so does “Pops.” My sister claims she’ll talk them into making me pick up the dormant “Pappy” mantle, but I don’t think I’ll let it stick. “Gramps” is suitably curmudgeonly. Maybe I’ll come out of left field and insist they address me as “Colonel.” Or I’ll take a page from Tolkien and adopt a title reserved for Chief Lighting Technicians in IATSE Local 728: “Gaffer.”
And I’ll instruct them never to refer to me as “Old Fart” without prefacing such a remark with “saving your presence, guv.”
Though my siblings and I and my father are all native Southern Californians, my mom was born in St Louis. A certain amount of mirth was obtained at the expense of her occasional regional dialect oddities.
“Hey, mom, what comes after thirty-nine?”
“Farty.”
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!”
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I was so disappointed to see that yinz was omitted or undetectable in the you guys/you/ya’ll map. I wonder what the diffuse grey ‘other’ is in Kentucky?
In my experience in China, people didn’t use that many distinguishing terms below grandparents in practice; friends at your parents’ age or uncles and aunts were Aiyi (for a woman) or Shushu (for a man), then brothers and other boys your age were Gege (older) or Didi (younger), or Jiejie and Meimei for girls. Most people under 35 don’t have siblings or cousins anyway, so there isn’t much need for the convention anymore.
Didi was actually the first character I learned in Chinese, mainly due to its similarity to a certain cartoon character.
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I’m pretty sure that’s not only in Milwaukee. I think it’s in Massachusetts, and there are also municipal bubblers in Portland, OR.
Kraft dinner.
“Based on your responses, it appears you may be from the place your internet server is located”. It’s an interesting way to get survey results.
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ya. but at least he owned up to it, he “liked” my post where I called him out.
We’re the westernmost end of Appalachia. The mountains are more central PA–Altoona area.
I’m in the Pacific Northwest, and never understood how there could be a difference between cot and caught until I was with a Floridan friend at a fish counter. She pointed to some salmon, and said, to my ears and the clerk’s, “Is it cod?” The clerk replies, “No, it’s salmon.” This goes around and around in a vaguely comical manner, until it becomes clear she was saying, “is it caught?” (As opposed to farmed).
At that moment, angels sang, and I understood the cot/caught merger.
Also, regarding roundabout/traffic circle, I heard that roundabout refers to the big ones, while traffic circle refers to those obnoxious concrete discs they put in neighborhoods to slow people down.
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Clearly cats care little for the laws of the land… Bunch of anarchists that lot of critters.
Weirdly, it was not far off…
That would explain it.
