East Coast word usage versus West Coast...

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87. Variations in word use and pronunciation

Last edited Wed Sep 16, 2020, 10:28 PM - Edit history (2)

from one region to another are pretty common.

I grew up in the east, in northwestern PA, and we said teeter totter, rubber band, and cellar. Like other posters here, we had a room below the house that was the basement. There was a room off of the basement that had a door to close it off. That room was the cellar, where my mother stored home canned veggies and fruit.

When I was 10, a new family from a small town in southwestern PA, near Pittsburgh, moved into the neighborhood. They called our city street a road, dragging out the vowels to sound like "ou" insted of "oa." It was a quiet street without much traffic, so in the evening, their oldest girl and I practiced tennis shots in the street on the smooth pavement. Her mother yelled at us, "Y'uns git outta the roooud." Y'uns is common in SW PA.

When I was a high school senior, we visited my brother in Philadelphia and I shopped for my prom dress, which we called a "formal" in my home town at the other end of the state. The store clerk did not know what I meant until I said it was for my prom. "Oh," she said. "You mean a gown." They also said soda while we said pop.

All in the same state. 2 hours east of my PA city, my cousins in Buffalo, NY had a "Buffalo twang." The word "car" sounded like "care" and "hot" sounded like "hat." That twang has mostly disappeared from Buffalo now.

I heard my favorite story about word use in college. Two girls who were Swedish exchange students told us that they learned British English at home. So in the US they shocked a boy in their class by asking him if they could borrow a "rubber." In British English, that's an eraser.