I’m not sure how regional that one is… In my experience in the eastern US, “mountain lion” and “cougar” are both common, “puma” is rare, and “panther” (at least for that species) is almost unheard-of.
Our next-door neighbors went to the New York World’s Fair and, in the middle of a hot afternoon, asked a guard where the nearest bubbler was.
“Take a right at the end of this building and how are things in Milwaukee?”
There is the Florida panther, which is technically a distinct subspecies, but still part of the same overall species as mountain lions.
In summary: Kohler company doesn’t claim to have coined the term Bubbler, nor invented it. In Wisconsin drinking fountains were called bubblers well back into the 19th century, long before Kohler Company existed.
But use of the term Bubbler for drinking fountain is quite localized to SE Wisconsin and bits of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. It’s often assumed that the name is derived from early models where the bubbles rose in the glass water container and made standard bubbling noises, when water was dispensed.
People in central Indiana are fond of calling bell peppers mangoes. Also, if someone says he wants a tenderloin, he probably means a pounded, breaded and fried pork sandwich.
Why??
That could lead to confusion here in South Texas where we have a couple of different kinds of mangoes and lots of different kinds of peppers in the grocery store.
Potato bugs.
There was a cool survey from Harvard that you used to be able to do. would identify where you learned American English. It nailed me. But i haven’t had much luck finding the original Harvard link.
And Po-boys. Which are the first ones I encountered. With fried oysters.
They got Oregon.
I’m in New York State. Been in the Northeast most of my life. I’ve been to Oregon for maybe a month, more than 40 years ago.
In San Diego, “rolled taco” is the most common name you’ll hear for what would be called a taquito or a flauta elsewhere.
Dropping the past tense is probably because most Asian languages don’t have past tense terms. Hawaiian pidgin English has a heavy Chinese and Japanese influence because of the immigrants who came to work on the plantations.
If I asked someone in Hawaiian pidgin, “You shave?”, it would be understood as “Have you shaved?”.
Ironically, I’m sure I’ve seen signs advertising shaved ice in Hawaii. I think in Asian restaurants. Possibly to avoid confusion from non-English speakers to whom shave ice wouldn’t make sense in their limited understanding of English.
Yes indeedy, we always referred to the ATM’s as TYME machines when I was growing up in Madison. The closest one to home was on Monroe St. at the First Wisconsin bank. It had a nice, glassed-in outer lobby where you could access the ATM without going into the building proper, as far back as the early 1980’s. From this spot you could walk 1 block to a grocery store, a pharmacy, a couple of gift shops, a clothing store, a hardware store and even a place that sold Apple computers.
IIRC TYME stood for “Take Your Money Everywhere” which seems a bit goofy thinking about it now.
This must be why so many Chinese restaurants offer “steam rice.”
I got California and I’m from Seattle, so not so bad. They didn’t have the answer for “Tennie Runners”, which skews towards the Pacific Northwest.
They also didn’t have the “caught/cot” question, which is another well-known divider, but that’s more for the accent, rather than the name of things.
My mother grew up in Johnstown PA. Her family said “outen the lights.”
The BuzzFeed link i gave is probably not the best dialect test because, well its a BuzzFeed test.
seems to be no longer active. but it was much longer as i recall.
I wonder whether “shut the lights” was part of the problem. I answered yes to that, because the question said “ever” and I might occasionally have said “shut the lights off”; but what I’d usually say is “turn off the lights” which IIRC wasn’t one of the options.
When I first got to Madison I’d have a friend say “Oh, can we stop by the tyme machine?” I was so tempted to answer “Sure, I could use twenty bucks, and some ducats from the Renaissance.”
Some variations must be due to age rather than geography. My grandma used to say…
hassock instead of footstool/ottoman
davenport instead of couch
pocketbook instead of purse
She also warshed her clothes and called the capital of the US Warshington DC. My mom picked up on that, passed it on to us, I used the pronunciation once in front of normal people and took a real flaming for it.