Retaking at the Times it nailed me pretty well with Akron/Columbus/Cincinnati as the 3 key cities.
I retook it - Ogged has exactly the nexus I should get for where I grew up, but instead I get Rockford/Rochester/Grand Rapids. I got Rochester, Buffalo, Albuquerque, and Bay Area with the long version last time. Sneakers for athletic shoes seems to be why I get Rochester. Wish I could rid myself of pop, although I mostly remember to call it soda. I spent the past week trying to explain the boyfriend's family's accent to him and failing utterly.
Albuquerque here, which is nice because I can barely even spell Albuquerque. I presume it's because I got my California in my Pennsylvania. (No! You got your Pennsylvania in my California!)
It nailed my origin, even after 30 years of Texas and my preference for "verge"
Apparently I am far too rootless a cosmopolitan, even for the Jew York Times.
I like how this version shows maps for the individual questions. I got Austin, Brownsville, and San Francisco as the three top cities at the end, although the map showed Albuquerque to be a good match too. Apparently Austin and Brownsville were because I put "18-wheeler" for the truck one, which is interesting. I actually use several of the terms in that one interchangeably.
I tried it again and got San Francisco, Oakland, and Fresno. Slightly different questions and slightly different answers to some of the ones I had gotten before, including the truck one. Albuquerque was again one of the likely areas based on the map.
New York, Yonkers, Newark -- now and foreva!
I think it's hard for folks who use multiple terms. I suspect I probably self-report differently than someone listening to me would. Seeing all the options makes me overthink it. Tractor-trailer and big rig were pretty common where I grew up. I use semi more often, but I don't frequently talk about trucking.
Washington/Baltimore/Arlington. Basically nailed it.
I am oudemia. A tiny bit hurt that Yonkers beat out NYC by a hair.
Boston, San Jose, and Honolulu.
Yard sale is very characteristic of Boston.
Saying firefly pushed me to San Jose and Honolulu. The truth is that I don't know what to call those bugs.
I fear, irrationally, that taking this survey would turn me into one of those people who says "I talk the talk but I also walk the walk."
New York, Yonkers, Newark -- now and foreva!
I think I got Newark, New York and Yonkers (I can't recall the order, it was a while ago that I did the quiz).
"hoagie" and "mischief night" pretty much peg me as a Philly-Jersey boy. I got Yonkers-Philly-Newark, IIRC.
Something I think it is doing is if your responses are kind of far flung (let's say you grew up in the mid-south with a Texan parent and a Philadelphian one and then lived in Chicago and New York or something) it focuses on one response to give you a town. Like when I said "hoagie" which isn't my default but I had already taken the thing once and was futzing around and it is a word I use, it gave me Philadelphia for one of my towns, though I doubt any of my other responses were specific. And saying "18 wheeler" somehow made me from Louisiana. When I was more neutral about my responses, I got California.
17 gets it right. Before those two came up at the end, it was fluctuating between Toledo and South Carolina.
Oh hey jinx, Team No Bath says 18-wheeler.
(No! You got your Pennsylvania in my California!)
Hee hee heeee I love this reference and sometimes use it to confuse people born after ~1978.
Was really surprised to see that people say "tennis shoes" in most of America. I thought that was the word people over 55 use.
I think I'm oudemia, despite never having lived anywhere she's lived AFAIK. However I get Smearcase's post-'78 reference because I'm literate, so I'm not the right person to take this test.
I grew up with tennis shoes/sneakers interchangeable.
I say running shoes now, but I used to wear sneakers, and you had different shoes for aerobics and tennis.
24: Your feet are supposed to be curved enough that each shoe will only fit one of your feet.
"Crawfish" said that I was from Louisiana which makes sense, since we don't really talk about those fish around here--unless we're talking to someone who's been to Louisiana.
Greensboro NC, Winston-Salem NC, Montgomery AL. Pretty much all of the rest of my father's family lives a county over from Montgomery, and I'm guessing W-S/G'boro beat Raleigh/Durham by virtue of having higher percentages of native North Carolinians than here.
I say "crawdad" because of an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies in which a stereotyped hippie meets the stereotyped hillbillies and hilarity ensued because of differing interpretations of "smoking crawdads."
don't really talk about those fish
Which aren't actually fish.
It says I'm from Yawnkers but that's a little too far south and definitely not my accent. Although the shading on the map actually shows the deepest red somewhat further north but there's no significant city up there it could highlight (actually too far north- if you averaged Yonkers and the coloring it would be pretty close to the right area.)
Crawdads is the first thing I ever heard them called but then we move away from Oklahoma and nobody talked about them.
33: Thanks, but I filled up at Arby's on the way over.
When I was a kid, we would catch them in the creek that ran through our neighborhood and the guy at the bait shop would give us a nickel each for them.
And we used crayfish, crawfish, and crawdads interchangeably.
This one randomly chooses sets of 25 questions, just like the short version of the other one. The long version with 140 questions isn't available anymore.
My parents took this one, which led to interesting conversations about how we all have different sets of vowel sounds we distinguish. (My dad and I merge "cot" and "caught", at least most of the time, but they're very distinct for my mom. I'm the only one who distinguishes "pin" and "pen". "Mary/merry/marry" are the same for me and my dad but for my mom "merry" is different from the other two.)
Also, I thought that my mom varied between pronouncing "aunt" as "ant" and "aint" but she insists she never said the latter, despite the fact that her sister does.
Orlando/Miami/Jacksonville (which does triangulate my hometown accurately). I received a different set of questions than it seems the rest of y'all did.
The questions seem to vary each time.
I thought I'd take it again because 1) the questions change and 2) I am a boring person, but the first one it chucked at me was second person plural and it reminded me that the quiz is slightly impossible for me. I adopted "y'all" at some point living in the south and then it went away in New York and now I say several different things depending on my mood.
I could liveblog it and murder you all with boredom. Pronouncing Mary and merry the same but marry differently (which happened to me in my last couple of years in NY) is apparently quite uncommon. There's a little blip of not-uncommonness in Louisiana and another in Philadelphia.
I just took it again and got three cities in California. As I said when we discussed this last time, the test is clearly designed to distinguish among the various dialects of the Northeast and Midwest (and to some extent the South), so Western dialects sort of blur together.
45: Yeah, I think that's the Philadelphia pattern. Boston also has a two-way distinction but groups them differently, and New York distinguishes all three, IIRC.
I think that's correct.
I got oddly discouraged (I have no identity!) watching my answers cancel each other out with the maps after each question so I stopped.
The test does not deal well with people who have lived in several places with different dialects and picked up various bits of all of them, it's true.
11:45 PST. It's the teo and smearcase shoooow. (To the tune of Itchy and Scratchy, obvs.)
I'm also secretly happy each time it says I am anything but midwestern because that is the American dialect that breaks my ears.
I got Oakland, San Francisco, and LA, in that order, which is what I got last time. Apparently the years I spent on the East Coast left me entirely untouched.
Apparently the years I spent on the East Coast left me entirely untouched.
Yeah, me too.
It's the teo and smearcase shoooow. (To the tune of Itchy and Scratchy, obvs.)
Featuring special guest jms as Poochie.
so Western dialects sort of blur together.
Yeah, it gave me Salt Lake, Reno, and Modesto. Pretty close considering my life is almost exactly split between L.A. and Salt Lake, with maternal grandparents both being from Salt Lake area and paternal grandparents both from Northern Cal.
As ever, oud is my cugina (I got New York and Yonkers, but Springfield instead of Newark) and Smearcase is my twinsie (I was acutely aware of I've picked up different terms in different places, and of how I use them interchangeably according to whim). The area of greatest similarity was pretty much exactly between the two places where I grew up, and there was some other related quiz a while back (strictly on pronunciation, maybe?) that put me in the same place.
Scarily accurate. It almost got the zipcode right.
In the interests of science, standard British English places me in Newark/Jersey/Philadelphia. Odd.
27: but apparently that's a modern phenomenon, and in the 18th century and earlier both left and right shoes were the same boxy shape. From some reasonable but not very weighty and also forgotten source. Maybe a historical novel.
Huh? Teo, I thought the Boston dialect had the three-part distinction on Mary, Merry, & Marry. I sure have it.
24: Ha! That was the answer that I, the archetypal midwestern accent/diction chauvinist, would have preferred.
Of course, I got pegged to Mpls?STP pretty accurately, although then apparently people in Rochester (NY) and Albany have similar speech patterns? Haven't spent enough time in those environs to know for sure, but the people I know from upstate New York have never struck me as having a discernible accent, so there you go.
Like Kevin Drum, I got the central valley on account of "frontage road." I've never lived there.
Natilo, I'm still laughing over "whipping shitties" for driving a car in tight circles ("doing doughnuts" elsewhere). Is this really a Mpls thing?
Wet pavement makes it easier so you should whip shitties while the devil fucks his wife (or whatever weird term they had for a sunshower.)
63: but watch out for peenie wallies distracting you.
Just took it. I was curious how it would do. I've lived in the Pacific Northwest most of my life, but I don't feel like there's a lot of terminology that's distinctive to this area.
As it turns out, it knows that I'm from the coast, but can't tell you where. Hawaii, Florida, California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska are all possibilities and the three cities are
Honolulu / Pembroke Pines / Miami
The answer for which I was most surprised that they had a choice that conformed to me usage was, "I use 'ant' when referring to the general concept of an aunt. I use 'ah' when I refer to a specific person by name." (though I'm not consistent. I definitely use 'ant' some of the time in the latter circumstance).
Taking it again swapping out a couple where I use both terms (Sneakers/ Tennis Shoes and Yard/Garage sale) it gives me:
Milwaukee / Salt Lake City / Fresno
So, for whatever reason, that time it pegged me (approximately) as Western but didn't identify me as coastal. I think the first result is more accurate.
Aurora (party on, Wayne!), Buffalo, Rochester.
I suspect I've got self-reporting bias masking the fact that I actually sound more southern than I think. I just back from Chicagoland, and I definitely don't talk like those people anymore.
I did it again and got Denver, Colorado Springs, and Springfield, Missouri, none of which I've ever so much as visited. But I got both the crawfish/crayfish/crawdad and roly-poly/pillbug/sowbug questions where I wanted to be able to choose more than one answer.
RE: Mary, merry, & marry
More people think they have this distinction than actually have it. (Many people who think of the words as sounding different don't produce measurably different vowels.)
(I got Spokane and some other places I don't remember, which, close enough.)
I usually get Santa Rosa/Sacramento, but just did it again and got Kansas City/Overland Park. On the strength of garage sale. I call bullshit.
Until ttaM posted that recording, I couldn't even fathom how to get three pronounciations of those words. Two maybe, if you were being pretentious.
Any time I have to refer to those little freshwater crustaceans I'm at a loss as to which version I'm supposed to use. I should just settle on "craydad".
I think 59 is correct. I definitely pronounce the three differently, and until the older version of this came out a few years ago, I had no idea anyone didn't. I don't have a standard Boston accent though, rather a muted western suburbs accent. It could be my New Yorker parents I guess.
Having lived in many parts of the country, the ones that ask which word one uses are less interesting to me. I say y'all because a friend in college did. And crawdad because it's more fun. I'm not (intentionally) changing my vowelizations anytime soon, though.
This reminds me that I heard several unironic yinz/yunzes in the hospital. Don't encounter them that much lately.
I've now tried it twice and got Baltimore in the mix both times. The second time, it also included Arlington and Durham. Prevalence of standard dialect with a few inadvertent Southernisms? (I was brought up in Austin by a Midwesterner and a New Englander.) Or just a random result of mishmash?
I walked a relative through it (Bay-an for 40 years) and she got Honolulu, San Jose, and Stockton. Probably Honolulu came from her giving "roundabout", in her case picked up from a British ex, but also used in Hawaii AFAICT.
It gave me Modesto, Fresno, or Salt Lake City. I guess I have more rural in my accent than I knew.
The frontage road thing is very silly--isn't the parallel road to 580 along the East Bay called "Frontage Road"?
I have lived in Maryland, but only for a few years in adulthood, and not Baltimore.
72: Do you pronounce berry and Barry the same? If not, that covers merry and marry for me. Mary is like barely, but without the L.
I would definitely have called them "crawdads," but the quiz didn't give me that question.
I pronounce Maryland, Merryland, and Marryland all different.
62: I've heard it here, of course, I guess I thought it was current in urban Wisconsin as well, based on friends' usage. But maybe they picked it up here.
Apparently the defining answer that placed me in Salt Lake was "kitty-corner."
77: Yeah, there are lots and lots of frontage roads named "Frontage Road" around here.
69: I'm guessing that's true for all sorts of words: most vowels in spoken English are schwas, right?
79: Nope! Indistinguishable. "Barely", too.
Huh. I guess sound recordings are the way to go then. Unless 69 is right, and I'm just imagining. I'm sure it's possible.
Merry Mary barely buries Barry, marries Berry.
(Many people who think of the words as sounding different don't produce measurably different vowels.)
This is me, exactly. For many of those. I finally took it as though I was using my most kneejerk/childhood pronunciations and still got nothing meaningful. Ie I resent being told I'm either from Dallas or Irving or possibly Ft. Worth.
85- well, many vowels have schwa as a surface form in unstressed syllables. Not all those schwas sound exactly the same, though.
People aren't very reliable sources of information about how they pronounce things generally. What your brain thinks you're doing and what your mouth actually does don't line up super well.
That sounds right. I remember reading about how if one is asked how they pronounce 'for', they will always use a 'hard' o sound, but since the word is almost always unstressed, it is usually a schwa. I hadn't heard of there being different schwas though... Interesting.
67: If memory serves, which it usually doesn't, you don't sound very southern at all.
There are different /i/s and /e/s and whatever too. Same underlying thing, slightly different productions in different environments.
Schwa is actually not very usefully-defined. Or at least, there are a number of different uses and definitions and tedious theoretical debates. Mmmm, phonetics.
Nor varry Southern, nor vary Southern.
I got Worcester, Boston, and Yonkers. Reasonable enough. It was only through unfogged that I learned that anybody pronounces merry, Mary, and marry in three different ways or all the same. I thought everyone had the latter two as the same pronounciation.
I swear I distinguish the m's, but I admit it's pretty subtle. I'm pretty sure there's something real going on, though, because I notice that non-distinguishers rhyme words I wouldn't -- one of the last times this came up, I linked to a political cartoon that turned on "Jerry" rhyming with "Larry", and it was incomprehensible until I remembered about non-distinguishers.
96 crossed with 95, and I admit that I'd swear "merry" is objectively distinguishable from the other two as I pronounce it, but while I'm pretty sure "marry" and "Mary" are different, if you told me the way I say them actually sounds exactly the same, I would be surprised but wouldn't call you a liar.
People aren't very reliable sources of information about how they pronounce things generally.
Some people really do pronounce them differently. Just not as many as think they do. Send me a recording, I'll provide official phonology consulting for everyone.
But the way things are spelled affects my thinking substantially, too. A person named Kristine does not share a name with Christine.
I am never sure how to answer in the cases where I have deliberately affected (magpie-like stolen) the terminology of another region. Like, I grew up saying crayfish, but now say crawdads, because that is just an objectively better thing to say. I also say gumbands, because it amuses me to do so.
99: I would, but I'm certain I would pronounce them differently now. Whether without thinking about it, I don't know.
Apparently the defining answer that placed me in Salt Lake was "kitty-corner."
The relationship can't be that simple, because I also say "kitty-corner" but it placed me pretty accurately (a lot of Your Kind migrated from Illinois, if I recall my history correctly). So, uh, algorithms and statistics.
I grew up in a house where "supper" was the evening meal and now say "dinner," which is a difference Mara finds hilarious. I'm more curious about changes like that and don't remember having made a conscious decision to change. There are a lot of words that clearly come from your family or the people who raise you, like what you call a pacifier or euphemisms for genitalia, words for undergarments, what you use to wash yourself. (Most of the kids who've come to us verbal say "rag" and for some reason that drives me up the wall, though I don't let on to them.)
My real fascination is what people call those barbell-like hair bands with plastic balls that get used a lot in black hairstyles but are used by white kids too. Balls, ballies, knockers, hairballs, kookooballs (which I thought at first might be just what Mara's family says, but I've heard it two other places including from a white girl recently and one of the packs I bought had the French version as "chouxchoux boules," which may or may not be connected) and I'm sure there are plenty of others I haven't encountered.
I grew up without a word for 'kitty-corner', but latched onto it as the greatest innovation ever the first time I saw it (I think it might have been in "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn", actually.)
104: In NYC, at least for me, anything like that is a ponytail holder, whether or not it's just a loop or it's one of the barbells-with-beads.
104.2: I'm going to start referring to them as "knockers" and see how long it takes me to get arrested.
what you call a pacifier or euphemisms for genitalia, words for undergarments, what you use to wash yourself
All the same word in my idiolect.
107: I thought of you when I wrote that! I forgot that Nia called them "ballballs" at first, which you also might like once you get out of jail.
I grew up without a word for 'kitty-corner'
Not "diagonal"?
"Diagonally across from" is how I'd naturally express "kitty-corner", but it's longer and I find it less fun to say.
Re: supper/dinner, my family used to have dinner around 2 on Sundays, followed by supper in the evening, which was small snacks, like apple slices and peanut butter, maybe popcorn. For the rest of the week, it was regular lunch and dinner. So, there was a supper, but it would be wrong to refer to the weeknight meal as such. It was yet another strange family quirk that marked my parents as not from the area.
Yeah, that's how it works for me -- "dinner" is the largest meal, "supper" is the evening meal, and they almost always coincide, but they didn't on Sundays at my grandmother's house, when everyone gathered for dinner after church (at about 12:30 or 1 PM).
"ballballs" at first, which you also might like once you get out of jail
I can't tell if this is a prison rape joke, or a setup for a prison rape joke, so let me just say, that's not funny, and I'm appalled.
I got Salt Lake City as well, and I also say kitty-corner. But I got that from my mother, who is from Ohio. All it does for me is place me somewhere in the West. (In reality, I now sound like an American or maybe possibly a Canadian? who uses British slang.)
The wikipedia entry on sunshower tells me that people are weird, but none more weird than Southerners and Hungarians.
I don't know, I think the French are even weirder.
The one that adds incest to the Southern/Hungarian one, not the one with the wolf.
That was a clear act of oneupsmanship by the French (none more risque, etc.). The original perversion surely belongs to the Hungarians.
Detroit and only Detroit, because pop + devils night = Detroit. I switched to soda decades ago, but chose pop in honor of being in Detroit.
There is probably a very efficient directed questionnaire that you could make out of these. Maybe start with y'all you guys etc. and then work a few singificant delimiters within the resulting region.
directed questionnaire
Is there a specific word for this? The thing you do to identify species, that's basically a flowchart? I think there must be, but I can't come up with it.
very efficient directed questionnaire
"Boosted decision tree".
122: Also let people pick more than one answer. A yard sale is the same thing as a garage sale, but a rummage sale is totally different, and I've never heard of a "tag sale".
I think that I say Mary and marry the same, but merry is different. I kind of wish that they were all different.
For the record, this was meant to be half the thread ago - right after 64 - but I wasn't connected anymore when I finished it.
My family did just what essear's did, administering it out loud to my father on 12/23, with much discussion.
I've taken it twice myself, and it's always agreed on my region - I was given six different Northeastern candidate cities - but hasn't come within 100 miles of my actual hometown (which is Albany, so per 60 I'm missing some Midwestern touch that is my birthright).
I've forgotten the exact look of the heat map, but I think it was about as spread out as my list was.
100: Even moreso than the -son/-sen distinction, this is a big question in MN. Any social context outside of a mosque is going to have about 17 (seventeen) distinct variations on than name. Kris, Kristi, Christi, Kristina, Christina, Christa, Krista, Krissy, Krissi, Chrisy, Chrissy, Christy, Krissa, Chrissa, Chris, Christine, Kristine, and probably some others that I ham too Ktocked to remember at this point.
125: Booawstin decision fackin' tree. Wizaahd cooawksuckah.