Alas, as a Mountain West/ West Coast immigrant to the East Coast I don’t have noticeable accent tics – not even SoCal Valley Girl intonations after 20 years of living there. I have boring old newscaster speech patterns.
I do, however, have some “vocab tics” that are occasionally remarked upon:
A car glovebox is a “jockey box”
Pizza is pizza - not “pie”
Interstates/highways take the definite article - “the 95,” the 206." The natives drop the article.
I go to the beach - not “down the shore.”
I asked our secretary to order a box of elastics. She was stymied (I wanted rubber bands).
A native Manhattanite, Mrs. Shark “puts out the light” and puts her socks in a “drahr” (kind of: her pronunciation is difficult to capture - somewhere between this and “drah’r”). She grew up in a German-Yiddish-English-speaking home and has some great expressions, some of which I’ve co-opted.
The Philly-Trenton- NYC region is a linguist’s paradise!
“Jagoff” is perhaps my favorite all-purpose epiteth, but tends to sound a little bit odd to people outside Chicago or Pittsburgh. I especially enjoy my father’s use of it peppered in his Polish speech.
Gotta say, I never expected this simple little question to generate such a wealth of stories and information! I’m loving reading about all these little variations on and idiosyncrasies of the English language. You Dopers are pretty frickin’ awesome!
Thanks.
A work friend and I were just talking about one the other day. She’s a native Californian and I spent 30 years in Colorado; both transplanted to the Midwest. We both say, “You’re fine,” if someone apologizes to us/bumps into us/pardons themselves etc. Not one person out here says it, so we’ve decided it’s a Westernism.
Growing up in western PA, it was always “pop”. Then I lived in Philly, just long enough for “soda” to sound right. The weird part was the year I alternated between Pittsburgh and Philly every few weeks and had soda and pop switching back and forth. It was really jarring!
And of course, “the car needs warshed” sounds perfectly fine to me.
I now just call it a “soft drink.” Because I can’t remember who calls what where. So I get universal puzzlement because it’s weird, but people know what I mean!
A former co-worker in Bristol, England used to do that, though he was half Jamaican, half Liverpudlian, so I’m not sure that helps.
The other local quirk that I tried very hard not to pick up from Bristol is the totally unnecessary ‘to’ they tack on the end of questions like “Where’s that to?” and “Where’s Bob to?” which simply mean “Where’s that?” and “Where’s Bob?”
I started doing it occasionally joking with a different co-worker with a very strong local accent, but I find myself coming out with it occasionally now by accident.
A lot of this stuff is familiar to me. I’ve started to hear a new (to me) wrinkle. When somebody says that something’s been there “right from the get-go”, an old way of saying “from the beginning,” it has morphed into “right from the gecko.” Maybe its all that exposure to the mascot for Geico Insurance. Gecko seems to change the meaning. However, I wonder how many people know what a get-go is. I don’t.
Huh. I’ve never heard “right from the gecko.” Either that or my brain has auto-corrected it to “right from the get-go” because it just thinks there’s no way any sane person would say “right from the gecko.”