To follow up a bit on Peter's question about dividing lines........I've thought that we need to re-State the US based on similarities and regions more than the state lines we now have. Florida gets chopped up about 4 ways with some of it going to Georgia and Alabama. We need a long thin state running 30 miles or so inland from Virginia Beach to Jacksonville; I mean what the hell does Charleston and Hilton Head have to do with the rest of South Carolina?

I grew up in SE Ohio where the association with West PA is much stronger than the rest of the state in some ways. In others though we are distinctly Ahians...not a typo, that's the way the word is said here. The Ohio State Marching Band is famous for writing script Ohio on the field. One game about 25 or so years ago, the band worked it out, unknown to the director, and they spelled Ahia instead.

One of those Pittsburgh words I love is JAGOV for jack-off. Somehow takes the edge off...Watch the movie "Gung-Ho" with Michael Keaton, takes place in western PA. At one point he distinctly uses jagov instead of jack-off and I still wonder if that was good script research or the fact that Keaton is a native 'Burgher.

Prior to the days of PC and much before Gay became a descriptive term (BTW, there is a crafts fair in the town of Gay, Georgia--the Gay Crafts Fair...always takes some explaining) the word Queer was a fence straddler. Even for those not wanting to offend, homosexual is just too damn cumbersome. So queer was used by "friend and foe" alike. One night in college, a friend from Pennington Gap, Virginia used the word twice in less than a minute, but said it in two different pronounciations. I asked about it and he explained that where he was from, SW Virginia, that a homosexual was a queer...same way we all say it. But if something was a bit odd or strange it was "kwiar." Has a little "ah" sound mixed with "choir." Ran across others from that neck of the woods said the same.

Another one that got me and was in common southern usage was "carry." As in, "My Daddy carried us to the game." I would have said "drove" or "took" instead.

Enough for now...I'm enjoying this thread a lot.

catspaw