American Cultural oddities

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From:
Date: 09 May 98 - 11:18 AM

The Hickphonics lexicon left out "foal", you know that shiney stuff ya uses to wrap up leftovers, lumnum foal.

Ther is the story of the northerner who went south for Christmas and went to church. Outside was a nativity scene, pretty typical except that the wise men had on these big red hard hats. He asked the preacher after the service (sarviss?) what that was all about. The preacher replied, "Well it say in the Bible that the wise men came from a far"

Bubbler update - It went at least as far north as Two Rivers where I learned it.

rich r

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Bob Schwarer
Date: 09 May 98 - 11:58 AM

Probably should be a separate thread. Think about all the Cajun "oddities".

They're not odd to a Cajun though.

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Bill D
Date: 09 May 98 - 12:16 PM

"jeet?" "s'gweet!"

"have you had your most recent meal?" "then let us go together and partake of sustenance"

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: judy
Date: 12 May 98 - 01:43 AM

Alice, glad you enjoyed it. I sent it to quite a few people after I read it too.

What about accents in your countries? Brits, do you have trouble understanding any Brittish accents. Ozzies, anything like this down under?

enjoy! judy

Subject: Woah Pete M
From: Debbie
Date: 12 May 98 - 07:00 AM

I was just skimming the posts above, and i caught your coment of the dutch using the foot to use for bulb fields, and as a true cloggie, i can tell you that at least in this area, it is not true, you've been misinformed. The dutch are metric, they use meters (meter is the dutch word, awfull similar to the american/english, isn't it!)and we plant by meter.

as to another odity, in america i believe you have road signs saying "soft berm" (and please correct me if i'm wrong here!), but do you know what the dutch ecquivelent is? Zachte (soft) berm - so who stole who'se word? and if you check out a dutch eetcafe (eating cafe, a kinda dark and dingy bar, with the floor full of peanut shels) you will find that america has bars that are quite similar.. not everywhere, i'll grant you, but they are there..

That was my two cents (dutch cents.. cents coming from the word hundred again.. )

Debbie

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Ted from Australia
Date: 12 May 98 - 09:14 AM

Bubblers, i used to drink from them where I went to school in Sydney Australia. Hav'nt heard the term in over 30 years. Regards Ted

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Bill D
Date: 12 May 98 - 11:49 AM

hmmmm...we have occassional road signs saying "soft shoulder" ...never have seen 'berm' used that way, and I have driven in 40 states...about the only place I have seen 'berm' is in a Geology text...

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Bert
Date: 12 May 98 - 02:57 PM

Judy,
Brits often have great difficulty understanding one another. The Geordie language (One can't really call it a dialect, it's too different) is completely unintelligable to a Londoner.

Cockney slang is used to deliberately confuse the out of town listener.

There is also the classical case of the invoice submitted by an Essex farmer for looking after a horse.

It went something like this...

Afetchinonim 1s 6d
Afeedinonim 2s 6d
Abringinonimomagen 1s 6d.

I'm not sure if I've got the actual costs right, but its the words that matter.

TTFN Bert.

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Pete M
Date: 12 May 98 - 04:52 PM

Methinks you over egg the pudding Bert, granted dialect + accent can quite often = foreign language, that doesn't mean its unintelligible. Given the wide exposure of regional accents on the BBC these days, I would have thought ther was less likelihood of misunderstanding now than there used to be.

Debbie, thanks for the update, I know Holland is metric. The point being made in the discussion I quoted was that the metric system lacked units which were easily translated to empirical. I must admit it was over ten years ago, so no doubt mechanisation has surplanted the need for the empirical by now.

Incidentally the term "berm" is used in NZ, which completely confused me as I, like Bill had only come across it in a geographical context previously. The Dutch were the second largest group of emigrants to NZ. so perhaps that is where the terms local use originated?

Pete M

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Bert
Date: 12 May 98 - 05:03 PM

Pete,
Have you ever heard a really thick Geordie accent? I used to work with a bunch of guys from County Durham and there was one guy that I couldn't understand. For example he would pronounce EVERY LETTER in the word "eighty" so that it came out "a-ig-hu-tee" . It was great fun watching him argue with another guy with a very thick Irish accent. They used to try to tell each other to speak English. We could make out the occasional word now and then but to follow the conversation was impossible.

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Earl
Date: 12 May 98 - 05:17 PM

re: bubbler Drinking fountains are bubblers (pronounced "bubblah") in Massachusetts too, at least north of Boston. I moved here from Western New York and also found the pop was called tonic and milk shakes contained no ice cream. Frappes contained ice cream. Actually, I think Mc Donalds has now homogenized the definition of milk shake even in MA.

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Roger Himler
Date: 12 May 98 - 05:55 PM

Maryland is South of the Mason-Dixon line.

Typical lunchtime conversation: "Jett jet?" "No, jew?"

Roger in Baltimore

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: steve t
Date: 13 May 98 - 03:41 AM

Hmmm. I figured that one out :-) Maybe food was on my mind.

How about a new thread: Cultural Curiosities II.

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Allan C.
Date: 13 May 98 - 01:23 PM

I have always loved to listen to the way folks speak and their remarkable use of certain words. While I am no professional, I have made a few observations. Aways back (Just threw that in the mix. I don't know where I picked it up!)up the thread, Joe spoke of I used to be able to tell what part of Virginia someone was from by how they pronounced "house" or "home".The sounds Joe refers to are quite similar to those produced by many folks in the Winchester area (except I believe the accent is on a different syllable!). Many people in the southern Tidewater area say something along the lines of "haewse". The latter group may also be found saying "hoem" - it is only one syllable there but the further west(on into West Virginia)you travel the more often it is heard as two.

The oddest thing I think I ever heard in English in the U.S. was "chigoana". Note that the "oa" is a dipthong rather than two syllables. "Chigoana" was used by a very old man and his even older brother whom I met near Shepardstown, West Virginia. The word was ususally followed by "fine". I conversed at length with the pair and finally came to understand that "chigoana fine" was an intoduction to an observation such as "Chigoana fine thet ef you take th' lef fork uv th' river, chigoana hev a better ride." In other words "you're going to find", "you're going to have".

Second only to this word was one I heard from a man from someplace in North Carolina who spoke of "toy-yers". Now, I have heard of "tars" and "tores" (depending on the size of the chaw tucked into the cheek I think) but it took me a while to understand that the NC man was speaking about those rubber things on the wheels of cars.

I once knew a carpenter once to whom "abode" was what you drove a nail into.

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Earl
Date: 13 May 98 - 01:54 PM

I had a driver-ed teacher who always told us to step on the exhilarater. His oddities, though, were personal rather than cultural.

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 13 May 98 - 06:50 PM

G'day Bert,

In re. your Geordie pronouncing every letter in the word eighty; keep in mind that the reason it is spelled that way is that every letter WAS pronounced - before the lazy pronunciation of the southern counties became "Received Pronunciation" and eventually "The Queen's English".

I admit that I am at risk of becoming even more pedantic on English: my copy of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language was waiting for me when I got home, last night.

Regards,

Bob Bolton

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Art Thieme
Date: 14 May 98 - 12:58 AM

I knew a pair of female Siamese twins that moved to England so the other one could drive. They shared a COBRA for frontal support.

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Ted from Australia
Date: 15 Nov 98 - 05:18 PM

Along with "A wig wam for a goose's bridle" my grandmother (2nd generation Australian, Irish roots) would answer juvenile questions with "A jim jam for grinding smoke"
Any equivalents?

Regards. Ted from Australia

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Paula Chavez
Date: 16 Nov 98 - 01:31 PM

Re: A southern US Engish lexicon

one addition:

SEBMUP: Noun. A clear, carbonated soda pop with no caffeine.

Judy, thank you for your post. Totally turned my Monday Morning Blues attitude around. Still howling!

-Paula

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Sir
Date: 18 Nov 98 - 09:29 AM

A couple of weeks ago I heard Ken Ham, an Australian living in America, who speaks at creation science gatherings. He mentioned that Australians hate pickles but love vegamine and that Americans are the opposite. He also told of asking a friend's daughter to nurse his baby and when she refused he told her that he supposed he'd have to do it himself! (in the US "nursing a baby" means more that caring for the child it usually means to breast feed)

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Ralph Butts
Date: 18 Nov 98 - 09:41 AM

My wife's from western Massachusetts and she says "bubbler". Only place I'd ever heard it.

....Tiger

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: Greg Baker
Date: 19 Nov 98 - 09:28 AM

Let's see:

Zee versus 'zed' - in my computer class, we have students from several nations... the ones from Tanzania says 'zed'; the Americans say 'zee'; and I say ZULU, that being the NATO standard I learned in the Army. Of course, I always pronounced 'Q' as 'KAY-bec', while my sergeants kept telling me it was 'kwa-BEC'. (Good thing I had the bar and they had the stripes).

Accents - I speak with a Worshington accent, having been born in the Nation's Capital; we have a local radio personality, Ed Walker, who cracks Worsingtonians up with his 'Dundalk Dan' parodies of a 'Balamer' accent. Historically, in the First World War American soldiers going into the lines occupied by other allies often preferred relieveing a French unit rather than a British unit... the British officers used slang and assumed the 'Colonials' knew it; the French would use gestures such as "A-a-a-a-a-a" to indicate a machine gun, and 'Boum!' for cannon. Then they'd slap the Yank on the shoulder, say "Bonne secteur, m'sieur,' and leave.

Speaking of Yank... A Yankee is north of the Mason Dixon line to most Southerners... and there used to be jokes such as "I was sixteen before I learned 'damnyankee' were two separate words.

I noticed the BBC World Service is making a valiant effort to cover North American sports on the North American feed, even referring to 'games' instead of 'matches' and 'one-nothing' wins instead of 'one-nil'. If someone can explaing cricket to me, I'll do my darndest to explain baseball... all but the infiled fly rule

Greg Baker [e-mail]

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: McMusic
Date: 19 Nov 98 - 11:02 PM

Just in case no one else mentioned (there are too many entries to check them all)-- Groundhogs are not hogs, nor are whistle pig pigs; both are terms for the same critter and it is a rodent-- And cucumbers and tomatos are not vegetables, they're fruits.

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: McMusic
Date: 19 Nov 98 - 11:07 PM

Aldus, You got part of it right. Unfortunately in this great country, we proceed according to color, gender, orientation, religion, finances....it's a pretty involved list. It's a long, hard road to freedom and equality.

Subject: RE: American Cultural oddities
From: GUEST,Jayto
Date: 29 Jul 10 - 10:08 AM

One regional phrase here (W.KY) that always causes confusion for people that are not from the area is "I don't care to". Most people that are not from around here take it as someone saying they are not going to do something. If you ask someone "While you are by the book on the table would you hand it to me?" The other person would probably say "I don't mind to at all." What they mean is yes and it doesn't bother them to do it. It is like they are saying it is no trouble for them and they are happy to do it for you. I have seen some people that are not local get VERY upset because they thought the person was telling them no. That is one of the most common misunderstanding I have noticed. Most of the times sayings and words just lead to confusion but this is one that really causes problems until it is understood what the locals mean.