Welcome to Litsy!

I heard about this book from the posts of @Tamra and @Chelleo recently. It was really fascinating! It was mostly spot on with which words or pronunciations I use. In a few cases, where my parents grew up had influenced a word I use. I like learning about word origins and this was a cool visual representation. Plus I learned the term “onion snow” which the librarian said to me yesterday when I got this book- now I know she must be from Pittsburgh!

Fun info graphic book!

I‘m not alone in my pronunciation of AUNT, but almost. 😆

This is such a cool photo/info graphic book about how people speak in the U.S.

This page discusses Crayons which can be pronounced as Krans (my youngest pronounces then this way... no clue why), Krey-Awns, or Krey-Ahns (the way I say it).

Post a cover you love each day for 7 days, no explanation. Use the hashtags and tag someone else. (For my own accounting purposes, this is the sixth of seven.) #7days7covers #covercrush Join in, @CoffeeNBooks !

One thing that the author didn't cover that I would have liked him to was people's pronunciation of "insurance." Here in the Northeast, we pronounce it "in-SURE-ance," but I've noticed that a lot of people from other parts of the country pronounce it "IN-surance." As opposed to what? Outsurance? This is stupid.

My favorite part of this book was the references to what people call the night before Halloween. That's because I grew up in Northern New Jersey, where it was referred to as Goosey Night, and unless one is from that tiny little sliver of Northern NJ, I've never come across anyone who knows what that is.

What does the rest of the country call this? Because there are several maps that indicate the various names of this that are centered on the Northeast, but what do they call it everywhere else?

How to pretend you're from Nebraska

Yeah, there's my Northeast coming out again. I say SEER-UP.

Really? Okay, I'm clearly revealing my Northeast dialect again.

As for the North/South divide, it mirrors many of the language divisions seen so far, with one exception: here the slaw-only group has pushed well north of y'all territory into Missouri, Indiana, and southern Illinois. Slaw is most common in North Carolina.

What we call a drive-through liquor store. Of course, being from the Northeast, I didn‘t even know that these existed. By the way, 77% of the country has no word for this.

Can you use frosting and icing interchangeably? For what it's worth, the Associated Press Stylebook--a veritable bible in many newsrooms--somewhat pedantically insists thst frosting is the term to use for cupcake and cake topping, while icing should be reserved for the sugar decorations applied to cookies.

I'm doubtful that it originated in Brooklyn. I've never even heard of this term.

WTF????????

REALLY? If I had ever heard anyone call it a "groshery" store, I would've thought they had a speech impediment. And yet...this map...how is this possible?

No offense to the people of Minnesota and Chicago, but this is really God damn stupid.

Philadelphia

(Continued)...-enced South Jersey and New York-influenced North Jersey. The line between the two stretches diagonally from northwest to southeast, running just north of Trenton, along the northern boundary of Bergen County, down toward Atlantic City.

How do you pronounce the word for a twenty-five cent piece? "Kworter" or "korter"? Almost 80% of people from both Hawaii and Louisiana pronounce the w sound and say kworter, making for an odd geographical pairing.

I say "Bin." What I find interesting about this map is that the overwhelming majority of New York pronounces it as "Ben." It's only here in the southern most part of the state, along with Northern New Jersey but no other part of New Jersey, that it becomes "Ben."

Cot and Caught sound the same vs. Cot and caught sound different.

Years ago, I dated a woman from California who told me, "I can tell you're a New Yorker because you pronounce it "waughter." I asked, "What's wrong with that? Why? How do you pronounce it?" She said, "I don't know...wotter?" In my defense, at least I pronounced the "r" and didn't call it "waught-uh."

COO-pon 68%
CYOO-pon 31%

That only adds up to 99%. I'll have to write a letter to the author to find out where that missing 1% went. By the way, COO-pon was the strongest here in the Northeast. I didn't include the maps here because they were a little weird and difficult to read.

Crayons. I guess I'm in the minority on this one too, because I pronounce them how they're spelled, which is KREY-AHNS. How the hell anyone gets KRANS from the word is beyond me.

This is another one that bothers me, although not nearly as much as the Coke thing. The question is, How many syllables are there in the word caramel? The answer is three.

When I was fourteen, I had the tragic circumstances of having spent about 48 hours in Kentucky. It was there that I encountered this particular strain of stupidity, where they refer to every type of soda as Coke. It still annoys me 26 years later. For about a thousand different reasons, I think all of the Coke states should secede from the union.

What you wear to bed. PUH-JAM-UHZ vs. PUH-JAH-MUHZ

Scratch paper vs. Scrap paper. I've never even heard the term scratch paper. I guess my part of the country is in the minority on this one.