I think I mentioned this in another thread, but my grandmother used to refer to "arsh" (aka Irish) potatoes, and "Vye-eena" (aka Vienna) sausages.

A common one in Yorkshire is 'tret' instead of treated. It's pretty much standard usage. 'Sen' for 'self' is another. As in "Do it yer sen"

I prefer to go down the ocean, hun.

No, not out of line at all. I'm really a Cincinnati girl so I'm still getting used to the culture of all y'all northerners up near Dayton.

One thing I'll tell you, y'all don't know what's good pizza. Everyone seems totally enamored of Marion's. Why the heck? It's not good! LaRosa's, that's some good pizza. ;)

Does Dayton have a dialect? I haven't heard any. Sounds kind of bland to me, after Cincy's blend of Appalachian, bluegrass drawl, and German.

My dialect, being from Pittsburgh?
You've probably heard of it, no matter where you're from.

Family flew out to Morgan Hill, CA for my brother's wedding in '04. The receptionist in the hotel lobby said, "Ah, you from Pittsburgh?"...doh.

Believe it or not, there's a Wikipedia entry on it.
(I use most of the words in the 'vocabulary' section..lol)
Even when I think about it, I don't consider myself to be talking improper
english. I do catch myself, however, using "Yinz" and "N'nat"...:)

The phrases page of Pittsburghese.com explains it very well. Say some of 'em out loud, and you'll get it.

Fstop (welcome btw) we have an old thread somewhere round here where people introduced themselves on video.

I'd love to hear your accent!

I just realized I made a mistake here. It's not "eye dialogue," it is "eye dialect." D'oh! Nothing like saying something dumb when you're trying to look smart. :rolleyes:

Here's the thread FStop.
Feel free to join!

This thread is wicked.

My JrHS principal was from Pittsburgh. Her accent was so crazy most of us thought she was faking it.

No, my friend, no. It's quite...quite real. ;)

Furthermore, to get back to the wrong context thing....
bugs me when people use "your" instead of "you're".....:mad2:

Do you mean in written english or spoken?

I sometimes listen to Dennis Miller's radio show and he's from Pittsburgh. The other day they had a halting discussion of caulk, halting because Miller doesn't pronounce the "l" in the word. It was comedy gold.

You pronounce the l?

I pronounce the l in "almond," but the rest of the world seems to leave it out. I never even realized I was saying differently until a few years ago, and now I have to think about it for a second before I say it out loud.

You'd be in good company here, most people seem to include the l and I'm in the minority for saying arrrmond.

In that case, maybe I can blame my weird-by-local-standards pronunciation on the few years I spent attending a British school. (Yay!)

I mean written. I know it's just a little apostrophe and an 'e'...but it just gets under my skin..

I don't pronounce the "l" either. My dad and I were working on installing a new shower in his bathroom a few months ago, and I don't know how many times I said, "Hand me that cockgun." :haha:

Even when I don't enunciate the L (though usually I do,) the words are still different for me: cock comes out "cahk" and caulk is more like "cawk"

The "L" is pronounced?!

Same thing with Duct tape. How many people just say Duck?
To drive it into the ground further, there's a company who makes it under the name "Duck Tape"...complete with a little ducky mascot.

http://www.duckproducts.com/common/g.../Item_2258.jpg

Which makes me wonder if the general public even knows it's really 'duct'...

My favorite plumbing double entendre is "pipe dope" ...

I have a friend that, in a home improvement store, asked the associate (I swear...) "could you point me out your caulk" and didn't pronounce the "L" - he didn't figure out for days why the guy continued to laugh...

Spouse constantly "confuses" words - combines drowsy with groggy & he's usually "droggy" in the morning. He also says "prior before" which DRIVES ME CRAZY!

Qualifies totally for a double-take when you see it, too.
And don't forget, as well, creme for your crack.
http://www.crackcreme.com/productimages/heelfeet.jpg

It's easy to tell apart here. I would say caulk as cawk, swallowing the l in the same way as I do in walk. The o in my cock is much shorter and sharper.

The o in cock is at the roof of the mouth, the o in caulk is pushed through slighlty pursed lips.

lol....I think we're getting almost a little -too- into the pronunciation of caulk..

Fixed it for ya;)

i can see a team of archaeologists giving eachother high-five's in the year 3126 when this thread is found. "I told you Nigel, they DID use a silent L sound in caulk back when they spoke English! You owe me 500 pesos!"

Nice foresight, blending British names with Mexican currency. lol

yes, but the name will be pronounced nee he. they've combined spanish pronunciation with our affinity for silent L's, of course.

Sucking caulk....


*


*


Now that's an esoteric vice.

It took me a while to work out why this was funny. Some Americans pronounce caulk the same as another word that shouldn't be said on air in the USA. I pronounce these words differently (even though I do not pronounce the "l" in "caulk" either), so the significance wasn't immediately apparent.

Americans with the cot-caught vowel merger do sound pretty funny sometimes to those of us who distinguish these vowels.

Walk, wok.

* When you walk a dog, you put it on a lead and walk around with it for a while.
* When you wok a dog, you cut it into small strips and fry it in hot oil with vegetables.

Stir-fried Fido, anyone?

And then there are those half-brights who pronounce the T in often.

Guess I'm only a half-bright then, I certainly pronounce it.

Me too. Sometimes. Mostly in fact. Indeed, most people I know do. Must be a dialect thing.


I wish I was like UG. It must be great to be able to so accurately judge people's intelligence levels and educational achievements based purely on their dialect/pronunciation, or grammatical errors.

Yes, why wouldn't you pronounce the t in often? Do you not pronounce the first r in February, and the h in what, where and when?

I uh- pronounce the t in often.

Well better half-bright than not bright at all! :)

England is a country of half-brights.
Near everyone I know pronounces the t in often, albeit in a swallowed kind of way.

I think you only pronounce it offen if you are really posh :P

The use of 'anxious' when the word should be 'eager' bugs the snot out of me. Yes, I know that some dictionaries now have that as one possible meaning. Writing guides still strongly recommend using them as originally defined.

I understand about the whole 'living language' argument. But it seems to me that, in cases like these, the language is the worse for it. Words that once had a precise and useful meaning are now more bland and less useful.

Hey, the living language embiggens us all.

Oh oh oh...I hate it when someone uses "yet" when they mean "still" as in "Do you have that recipe yet?" What they mean to ask you is if you kept the recipe because they had given it to you last month, and wondered if you still had it in your possession.

Drives me batty.

I don't consider embiggen or even ginormous to be an acceptable trade-off for the dilution of anxious.

It's obvious that I am rapidly approaching codger-hood.

But anxious does have a precise, slightly different meaning when used in place of eager. I am anxious to ... as opposed to I am eager to... suggests a difference in how that anticipation is being experienced. Eager is a positive anticipation, anxious suggests that the experience is less positive.

Unless people are using it in a situation about which they are entirely positive.

In that case, you are using it correctly. Well done, you.

Something along the lines of "I'm really anxious for summer vacation to start" would be incorrect, but is often used.

What if you interpreted that sentence literally instead of assuming a wrong meaning?

Then you would be like my husband, whose children are constantly frustrated when he deliberately misinterprets what they mean rather than just explaining what they should have said.

I like his method.

Compare it to, say, seeing dirty clothes on the floor*, close to the laundry chute. I *know* what was meant, the clothes are meant to go in the chute. But I *choose* to "deliberately misinterpret* the child's action, drawing attention to it, and having them fix it. My hope is not to frustrate them for sport, but to get them to correct it themselves.

Frustrating them gives them something to move away from. It's a tiny stick to complement the tiny carrot of doing it right the first time.

Say what you mean and mean what you say.


* used dishes in the sink next to the empty dishwasher is another common and apt comparison.

Not necessarily, it may simply indicate that they have a slightly negative orientation to waiting: it makes them feel impatient and anxious to anticipate something, therefore they are anxious for the Summer to start.

How do you deliberately misinterpret the clothes on the floor? What do you say? Me, I say, "Put your clothes in the dirty clothes basket," and if the habit persists it gets pointed out with stronger methods and consequences. (For the record, so does Mr. Clod, I don't know exactly what sort of methods you're talking about here.)

By "deliberately misinterpreting," I'm talking about, instead of saying, "You mean to use the word 'eagerly' there, because 'anxiously' means more like...", saying something like:

"Well, that's funny, I don't know why you would be afraid of summer vacation."
"...What?"
"You know, you said you were nervous about summer vacation."
"No I didn't." (or more usually, we repeat the dumbfounded "...what?" cycle a few more times first.)
"Yes, because you said you were anxious."
And by then they mutter, "Yeah, okay, whatever," and don't actually learn what the mistake was, or worse, defiantly persist in using the wrong word, because they're tired of the passive-aggressive game.

Well, perhaps the analogy breaks down here. It works if you believe that the kid knows the right word, and also knows the right action (clothes/dishes). If we all know what the right usage is, and there's still misuse, then what's a parent to do to correct the error?

Why is the word being used incorrectly?

I see the dialog you use above as an attempt to use humor to instruct. I could be wrong. Is it just a passive aggressive game, where the adult is showing off? Then it's an *entirely* different problem, and language and vocabulary is just the weapon du jour.

I have a large vocabulary. I have been accused many times of talking over the heads of others for the punitive effect. Really? I'm just a windbag. ymmv.

Well, that's the problem--the intention is definitely humor, but the kids in question don't have a great sense of humor. They're constantly looking for the "trick" behind everything everyone says. My response is to be straightforward instead, his is to persist with the humor in the hope that they'll lighten up someday. We'll see.

All in all, I end up agreeing with V here. I've been asked before to dumb it down, and have firmly turned down every such request as ill advised, and shall always. If I write the English of an educated man, where's the downside in someone reading like one?

Requests to be as stupid as someone else thinks they need me to be I deny as a matter of course. Some people are lame enough to think this arrogant.

Well, that's enough with the splenetics.

Back at an older part of the thread, I was taught "offen" by simply everyone, parents and teachers alike. Pronouncing the T, while accepted by Webster's 3rd among others, seems to me unnecessarily affected. Affectation is usually unnecessary, come to that. Half-brights, I say, and I say it with confidence, DanaC. I expect I shall continue to twit you from time to time over your fits of notwithitness -- do recall which of us is the socialist at our age, and which of us is not. You aren't the one to shake me, try though you may.

Am I the only one who sees the irony in that?

@ UG. It isn't affectation if it's the way you've been taught to say the word by everybody around you. It would be an affectation were I, or Sundae, to start pronouncing it offen. In much the same way that it would be an affectation for you to start pronouncing it often. You've just accused most of the British nation of being half-brights because they pronounce a word differently to the way you (an American) pronounce the word. What an utterly ludicrous position to take. Even for a man of your arrogance that is wholly preposterous.


I expect you shall. And I expect I shall continue to twat you from time to time over your fits of pomposity.

Well, I suppose you're the one who imagines the irony. Will that do?

I am anxious and eager to pick up my puppy today!!! Yea! Mostly eager....:D