Saturday, March 25, 2006

Y'all Want to Run Along the Frontage Road in Our Sneakers to Go Get Some Soda?

Here's a pronunciation/usage quiz that determines where you reside along the great Yankee-Rebel divide. The higher the score, the more you're a hick. Or something like that. I say that with love, though, since I'm not exactly pure north myself. My score came up: "43% Dixie. Barely in Yankeedom." This is partly because, strangely, I pronounce "route" and "pajamas" in a strongly southeastern way, despite having spent just about no time in that part of the country (aside from two trips to Disney World before I was 10). My southernness was also exposed by "access road," which is what frontage roads are called in Texas, where I learned to drive.

I could have been even more Dixie if you were allowed two answers for a question -- for how I address a group of people, I went with "you guys," because that's generally true. But I can slip into "y'all" pretty easily.

(Via Living the Scientific Life)

5 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Eek! 72% Dixie and they wanted me to check my neck for signs of redness...

Am I going to have a huge problem with moving to New York later this year? Should I be enrolling in English as a Second Language classes?

2:49 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm 30% Dixie and therefore, according to the quiz a certifiable Yankee Doodle Dandy. I was cheated of my regional purity by my pronounciation of Route and my preference for putting my groceries in a bag, not a sack or a poke. Maybe if I move to Maine, in time...

3:45 PM  
Blogger Mrs. White said...

34% Dixie, and a Yankee indeed. Not only that, but most of my responses correctly indicated that I was from the Great Lakes region and "Devil's Night" pegged me as a certifiable Michiganian. I'm so predicatable.

9:18 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

41% dixie, which is 2% less dixie than my brother. i've done some calculations, and i've discovered that while he and i have spent the exact same amount of time living in the great state of new york (20 years each), that's 71.4% of my life and only 62.5% of his.

i didn't like any of the names for the bug, actually. i think i call them water bugs, but that wasn't an option. the next most comfortable was pillbug.

they had the 'caught' one backwards. southerners pronounce it 'cot' and new yawkahs say 'cawt'. if not, it would be the one exception for that sound. i have plenty of anecdotes to support this from when i was a 5th grade yankee transplant being humiliated by my texan classmates.

i had no idea that the night before halloween was called anything but....well, that.

11:35 AM  
Blogger Nathan said...

30% Dixie.

Ah yes, Devil's Night. The night when the abandoned buildings of Detroit are set ablaze. Have you seen the movie The Crow? It is set in Detroit on Devil's Night.

Good times.

12:36 PM  

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