I have a couple of questions about why things are said the way they are on TV vs. how I say them in my daily life.
On sitcoms, the characters are always going to “the market,” never “the grocery store.” I’ve always used “grocery store,” and I’m disinclined to believe that it’s a regionalism unique to the Midwest, where I live. I’ve been in many places throughout the US, and it’s always been referred to as the “grocery store,” as it is in most of the national print media that I read. Is there a reason for this [seemingly] unique usage on TV?
Similarly, on commercials the sugary substance in many candies is called “CARE-uh-mell,” as opposed to the “CAR-muhl” that I’ve always used. In this case I’m inclined that I may be using a uniquely Midwestern pronunciation, but I could be wrong.
Finally, the phrase “BM” as a euphemism for bowel movement. I’ve heard it before, but most recently on Supernatural, where Dean sarcastically asked an angel if he (the angel) were interested in “knowing about the BM I took this morning.” TV standards are lax enough these days that Dean could have said “crap” or “dump,” neither of which would have been out of character for him, and no one would have raised an eyebrow.
Anyway, is anyone familiar enough with TV standards, or regional language usage in the US, to speak to these observations?
BM for bowel movement is so common in the South that I heard it zillions of times before I ever realized it was an abbreviation. (And I’d call it that before I called it a euphemism, by the way.)
The alternate pronunciations for caramel are fairly widepread. I’ve seen commercials mocking them; I’ve heard my sisters arguing over which is correct.
I expect that “the market” for “grocery store” is a Western usage. Note that I didn’t write “ism,” as the term is in no way incorrect or substandard.
I think it’s often a case that whatever term being used is a regionalism, and the writers/directors don’t realize they are regionalisms, or think that theirs is the preferable term, when it’s just … a regionalism.
One that still irks me after all these years was an episode of Designing Women where one of the women had to get/renew their driver’s license. I’m from Georgia, and in Georgia (at least at the time, all during my childhood and young adulthood), the State Patrol runs the driver’s license testing, issuing, etc. All through this episode they kept talking about “the DMV” in relation to the license. I’d never heard the term, and no one I knew had ever heard the term. I found out later, of course, that in California one deals with the Dept of Motor Vehicles in regards to one’s driver’s licence. So, here you have a show set in Atlanta, with Southern creators/producers/actors, and they used an acronym for a gov’t agency that didn’t even exist in the state of GA.
Other examples: I say “buggy,” TV characters say “cart.”
I say “soft drink” (or, if I’m being really Southern, “Coke,”), TV characters say “soda” or, heaven forbid, “pop” (shudder).
Something similar happened on a shortlived TV show I no longer remember the name of that was set in Detroit. In Michigan we do that stuff at the Secretary of State, not “the DMV”, yet here was this guy, standing in a ridiculously long line at “the DMV”.
Kelsey Grammar & Patricia Heaton had a short-lived sitcom set here in Pittsburgh that lost me after one episode. It was set in a local TV news room, and they had no fewer than five Pittsburgh impossibilities in one segment of the first episode. Just no fact-checking at all; and to make matters worse, the actor who played the station manager spent four years in Pittsburgh (as a student at Carnegie-Mellon University) and should’ve been able to say “um, wait a minute” about at least three of those errors.
As for “carmel” vs. “caramel” I’ve always been undder the impression that there’s a difference between the two, and that’s the inclusion of milk.
Maybe the weird usages are a consequence of the fact that in real life we frequently use proprietary names for things. I usually don’t talk about “going to the supermarket” or “the shops” - I say I’m going to Woolies, or whatever. I don’t go to the “ice-creamery”, I go to BaskinRobins. And so on.
Perhaps the usages on TV clang in large part because they have to use generic names for things that no-one ever actually says in domestic dialogue.
That’s no excuse for the DMV thing, but it’s easy to understand how an industry located for the most part in LA can come to pretend that the whole world is California. That’s no mystery.
I have never watched *24 *but an article in the Washington Post recently pointed out that the characters will often refer to roads in this area as, for example, “the 355.” We never say that, we just say 355. But in LA, where the writers live and work, it is the norm to put “the” in front of route numbers. (The article was about all the geographic miscues on the show, like a body of water under the White House.)
I always chalk it up to trying to be generic so the entire audience can understand. Should you say couch, sofa, or chesterfield? Soft drink, soda, pop, Coke, or soda-pop? Yes, even though we don’t have a DMV in Michigan, and even though Tim Allen would know better, Home Improvement had national appeal, and everyone else in the country would wonder why the heck anyone would be standing in line at the “Secretary of State” (do you need a passport to travel out of Michigan?).
The pronunciation of caramel is interesting. They’re “karmal” apples but the stuff that makes 'em that way is caramel.
Grocery carts can be buggies as well. I grew up with “buggy” and had forgotten about it until Claire Beauchamp mentioned it. I’m not sure if it’s in common use, or something that my ancestors brought with them from Kansas/Nebraska.
I’ve never ever heard of “BM,” on television or otherwise.
Around here, it’s always “the grocery store.” Maybe, sometimes, I’ll say “supermarket,” but I don’t know if I’m just weird or if other people do it, too.
Please forgive the slight hijack since this is not really an idiom or a pronunciation, but countless times I have seen people on tv sitcoms talking about how much one of them paid for a house, or is getting paid, etc. and instead of just saying the amount, the person gets a pen and piece of paper, writes something on it, and shows it to the other person. I have never seen anyone do this in real life.
When Nestle released their Crunch with Caramel bars a few years ago, they made fun of the CARmel/CARuhmel pronunciation differences in their television advertisements. Shaq and some kid sat around arguing over the pronunciation of the word. Here 'tis on YouTube. The commercial’s faceless narrator pronounces it “CARmel” as does the kid, while Shaq uses “CARuhmel.”
I’ve read that that is a device used so that 10, 20, 50 years down the road, the number will not seem so outdated. In one ep of “The Fugitve,” the air fare between NYC and Athens Greece is $358, and in one ep of “Dragnet” (1960s incarnation), a person is mentioned as living in an impressive-sounding $8500 (yes, 85 hundred) house. In LA!
I’d be willing to bet in today’s dollars, the airfare would be lower, and a house in LA would be a lot more than the earlier inflation-adusted numbers.
The media employs people to watch out for this sort of thing (my partner occasionally does it for British / U.S. productions), but vernacular speech falls so far under the radar that a lot of people don’t realize that their speech has regionalisms, much as many people would claim they don’t have an accent. And of course settings are not usually chosen for their speech patterns. Most of the errors I hear are either L.A. or New York speech imposed where it doesn’t belong, or people trying to represent a dialect they know nothing about (“Your character is Southern. Just call everybody ‘y’all.’”)
