Tacoma, Washington.
and
Orlando and Pembroke Pines, Florida!
Tacoma, Washington.
and
Orlando and Pembroke Pines, Florida!
I find it heartening that so many people are reporting getting “pegged” to fairly widespread yet specific metropolitan area locations. So many of my friends got the same sets of results that I was starting to suspect it only divided the country into 8 sections or something. Of course it just means nearly all my friends/family are from the same area as I grew up, that’s all.
I just went through the quiz a second time with my kids and tried to answer each question as opposite as possible to the natural response (including picking what I would consider the most nonsensical answer, like the one about “the devil beating his wife” for rain on a sunny day). It said we were from Baton Rouge, LA.
Next experiment: to see how well I could “fake” being from somewhere. I lived for 2 years in Baltimore and just spent 6 weeks in the SF Bay area (though among a lot of ex-pat NYers).
That’s going to be tough because their question set evidently includes very localized lingo about everyday things that outsiders probably have no idea about. Still, for all you non-New Yorkers, who often complain that NY is overrepresented on TV and so on - can you mentally channel George Costanza or something and try to come out with a NY result?
I guess it’s the “potato bug” reply that keeps skewing my location. I grew up in San Diego and as children that’s what we called 'em. I can remember, though, some new neighbors (also San Diego natives) who moved across the street from us and called them "pill bugs. From the map results it looks like that is a quirk of SLC and Washington state.
I tried varying my answers among the ambiguous replies and never got closer than the Bay Area. The first answer was probably not bad: Tacoma, Boise, and SLC. What was accurate about it was the big, red swath across all of the Western US. I have a typical Western American dialect.
Though it was interesting to see where they think use of “coke” for a soft drink is concentrated. Yes, it’s a COKE dammit!
Many years ago, the Coca-Cola ™ Company sued and ended up owning, a Mom and Pop restaurant that served another popular soft drink as “Coke”.
I also find it interesting that according to the final “heat map” of regional similarities, while it again pegged me (on a second retake) as being from NY/Yonkers/Jersey City, there two “hot spots” of high congruence in South Florida and right at San Francisco - doubtlessly due to all the NYC area transplants to there.
More surprising to me was that nearly the entire South and Southeast is only a pale yellow color in incongruity - about the middle of the heat map range - while the blue and deep blue areas of highest incongruity are around the Great Lakes, especially Wisconsin.
So (my) NY dialect has more in common with the language used in central Alabama than in Chicago?! That highlights the fact that most of the questions gauge based on colloquial phrases or grammatical idioms rather than accent.
Yeah, extreme regionalisms must’ve been weighed very strongly (and why not). I never even knew the night before Halloween was a thing, never heard of a curly bug of any kind, never heard of drive through liquor (don’t know jack about highways/freeway, but that because I don’t drive–hah! Algorithm).
NYC.
You know what’s/will be cool? When they start running and testing these things without semantic hooks, but with voice recognition. That’s how everybody human does it first, before cluing in on the regionalism.
ETA: There are people who study this diachronically–Shakespeare’s accent (but since he was a poet his plays alone are iffy), and what I’ve seen, the accents of the first US generations, so there’s great cross-national work.
Okay, took it again. It gave me Buffalo, again – and Grand Rapids (which kinda makes sense) and, bingo, Philadelphia, probably because I got the “hoagie” question this time.
Also, “What do you call an easy high school or college class?” has an “other” option, but no “none” option. I would call it “an easy class.” “Crip course” sounds familiar, but I thought I heard the term as “crib course.”
Rolly poly is the most common term I heard as a kid for those guys, but the term bothered me and I never used it.
Pegged me as Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or Grand Rapids MI. Not bad, considering that I grew up in Chicago.
Apparently my adulthood in the Northeast has not left any kind of linguistic mark, however.
“I have no term for that.”
Of course, I’m an engineer.
It nailed me pretty good, Tacoma (born there), Seattle (live near there now) and then Salt Lake City. Drove throught there once years ago. I did date a Mormon gal years ago. She was originally from Utah.
Grew up near Buffalo and it indeed pegged me as from near there. If it had asked me about pop/soda I may have gotten a different answer, cause most of the time these quizzes place me from far away from there.
I didn’t answer anything to the large truck question, because I call it a semi, tractor-trailer, and occasionally 18 wheeler at different times.
It might have gotten me if it had given me that question, but instead it pegged me for around Syracuse NY with a secondary guess of the Chicago area. I did live in Chicago for about 5 years, but have lived in CT for 30. In answering ambiguous questions, I chose my Cleveland-upbringing answers. For example, I answered “yard sale” which is what I called it growing up, though I’d probably now actually say “tag sale” which is what it’s called here unless I was talking to my relatives back home.
It gave me a huge red splotch covering most of the Midwest and Great Plains. The splotch does include Cleveland, but its first three guesses were Ft. Wayne, Omaha, and Wichita, none of which I’m aware of ever setting foot in. And it never asked me about tree lawns nor potato bugs.
It has me in Alabama again.
I said “co-cola”, which I her around her a lot.
I winder if “you’re not from around her” would be a good clue?
I tried to choose the answers according to how we talked while we were growing up in Cleveland when we were kids. That would be my native dialect. I purposely ignored the changes I’ve made as an adult in my idiolect, which would probably fuzz the results. For example, now I pronounce caramel as [ˈkɛrəˌmɛl] because of the spelling, but growing up it was always [ˈkɑːrməl], so I went with the latter. Maybe because my dad’s baptismal name is Carmelo, so I consciously tried to differentiate between the sugar confection and the mountain in Israel. I never heard of a drive-thru liquor store in NE Ohio, but then I moved away from there 22 years ago and have missed a lot since. I even went to Kent State University in the late '80s, but as far as I knew when I lived there, there was no such thing.
I was surprised that my answer for “potato bug” didn’t match Cleveland very well, because that’s what I heard the other kids calling it. But then I remembered that my mom called it a “roly poly.” Maybe I’ll try it again.
I took it twice, with a couple of different questions on the second quiz.
It pegged me with ‘neutral ground’ and ‘poor boy’ (which should be poboy BTW).
Both times my 3 cities were Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Shreveport.
I’ve lived 30 minutes north of New Orleans & an hour south of a Baton Rouge for 35 years. I lived east of Shreveport as a child, but we moved all over the South until we settled here. I’m sure I picked up some things that aren’t unique to New Orleans, and still use them. some things I’ve picked up from watching Brotosh programming and reading UK versions of books. I say ‘roundabout’ but the few we have here are called ‘traffic circles’ even though ‘traffic circus’ would be more accurate.
A drive -thru liquor store is usually called a daiquiri store, mainly because all the ones we have sell frozen daiquiris as well as liquor and beer.
My daughter says ‘crown’ for ‘crayon’ but I grew up calling them ‘colors’.
A digression. I apologize.
Did Kent state build the gymnasium they were planning on the field where the students were shot by the National Guard?
Well, I finally got it to peg me in Cincinnati–my first few times through, it was convinced that I was from three cities in North Carolina due to my choice of “yard sale.” Honestly, we call them that here too. But we also use “garage sale”, so I tried that one–and it gave me Cincinnati, based on “gym shoes”. (Also Dayton and Ft. Wayne, IN, because of “pop”. I tend to use “soda” now, but I think that was a conscious decision I made one day, because I thought “pop” sounded silly/childish.)
My likely zone is yellow or red everywhere in the U.S. except for a bluish streak from Michigan to Texas.
Perhaps me being in Montreal yields nonspecific results.