Do you have any words in your vocabulary or speaking that people will do a double take at? I recently said that something would 'tump' over. My wife said 'wtf is tump' and I said, you know, it falls over. We had to look it up and sure enough, in the Southern US, it's used as a verb. I also remember her calling a big barn a 'pole barn'. She's from Indiana and I guess that's a common thing. All of the barns I was around as a kid had poles in them but were just called barns. Another Southern euphemism I still hear mostly from people from the bumpkin areas of Houston is adding 'and them' to a sentence. John and them went to the bar instead of They went to the bar or John and his friends went to the bar. These sort of language nuances always pique my interest. I'd love to be a language expert but I don't have the motivation for such a grand new hobby and my wife says I'm not a cunning linguist so I'll just stick to my regular areas of expertise.
Sounds like you'd like the Lingthusiasm podcast. https://lingthusiasm.com/ Two of my favorite episodes. One of my best friend's that's since passed away was deaf so ALS and how even sign language can have it's own regional dialects is interesting to me. Also the idea that there are communities of deaf people that collectively created their own sign language local to themselves that outsiders don't understand and how there are linguists that specialize in sign language who are out to decipher them is also interesting to me.
The other day my wife and our friend were talking about Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I was walking through the room, thought about it for a second and said that Walt Whitman was full of ****; grass has blades. Of course, this spun them up because I was talking trash about this poet, which was my goal anyway. Our friend looked it up and apparently the word blade comes from the old English blaed, meaning leaf, and blade as in sword blade, was originally a reference to plants, meaning ‘leaf-shaped’. It could be used for spear tips as well. So it was adopted for grass. I said no one says that grass has leaves and WW was a pretentious b*stard for writing it and still and full of ****.
You have to be careful in Indiana or you'll get tumped over and rubbed the wrong way in the pole barn.
We're all so used to saying "ya'll" but people who aren't from the South really get a kick out of it when you say it to them. Not really related, but it took me 40 years to figure out that it was Eric CLAP-ton, not Eric CLAMP-ton.
Something else that I got from Indiana- they don't vacuum the rug/carpet, they sweep it. With a vacuum.
And them is so versatile. This way, I don't need to determine or explain John's relationship to them. I clicked on the video just because I wanted to listen to the song. I'm not sure how it relates to the thread though
