It’s a Regional Thing
I went to the launch party/book signing for Sweet By and By a new novel penned by my dear writing friend Rachel Hauck and country music star Sara Evans at the Davis Kidd bookstore in the Green Hills mall here in Nashville last night.
Rachel and I met in 2001 at the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference and she, along with Patty Smith Hall, another dear writing friend, encouraged me to join what was then known as American Christian Romance Writers (now ACFW). Over the years, Rachel and I have worked on different projects together, from the praise band/women’s choir at a couple of early ACFW conferences to serving on the board of ACFW together for a year (she was president, I was volunteer officer) to touring Nashville and going to the Bluebird Cafe to listen to music when she was doing research for Diva Nashvegas and her other Nashville-set books.
Because I lost a few hours last night in which I should have been working—or pre-posting a blog—I’m going to make this entry short so that I can get some work knocked out.
So here’s something to ponder and then to post a comment about (after all, you need to be able to leave a comment for the contest, right?) . . .
Amongst the myriad of weird things that Middle Tennesseans say, there’s one that stands out to me more than the rest. It’s the penchant for adding an S to the end of store names. For example:
- We’re going to Krogers. (If you look at their signs or go to their website, the store name is Kroger.)
- Let’s meet at Paneras for lunch. (Again, look at the sign!)
- We did most of our Christmas shopping at Walmarts. (No kidding. Folks around here call it Walmarts.)
I guess they think that someone named Panera owns the restaurant, or someone named Walmart owns the stores, so they’re making them possessive, but it weirds me out every time I hear it.
What’s one speech pattern/saying that’s unique to your neck of the woods—or something you noticed elsewhere when you’ve traveled outside of your area?
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KayeDacus.com 
The one that I always loathed was c-r-e-e-k being pronounced “crick.”
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Yep. That one gets me too. Gives me a crick in my neck!
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Um, they do the exact same thing here in East Texas. I can’t believe how often its “Walmarts”
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Hmmm . . . I wonder if it started in E. Texas and all those country-music wannabes brought it here with them? (Because we’ve got LOTS of E. Texas immigrants here.)
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Maybe.
I just realized people do it to Kroger and Brookshire too but because I didn’t know those places until I moved here, I never paid attention.
Do they say that they are going to carry you to church/store/friend’s house – meaning giving you a ride? LOL
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Nope. No carrying going on in these parts—not that I’ve heard, anyway.
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My husband hates that up here (N. Idaho) we say “come with” dropping the “me”.
Something I always notice when I travel is it seems we are one of the few states that doesn’t say “Soda” we just call it POP, it’s even on the Walmart sign that way. To name drop since we do get that one “right” 😉
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LOL. Everyone knows the generic term for carbonated beverages is COKE. 😀
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Amen! 😀
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Kaye, before I answer I just have to tell you how much I’m enjoying reading your book Stand-in Groom! I don’t tend to read much romance, but the cover was too good to pass up. 🙂
Okay, I’ll switch gears now. I used to live in Michigan and one thing it took me awhile to get used to was everyone calling soda, like Pepsi or Sprite etc., pop. Now I say pop instead of soda and I’ve had people comment on the way I say it. What a hoot!
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Thanks, Sharon!
With as much as I defend the Southern tradition of calling all carbonated beverages “coke,” I picked up on the mid-Atlantic term “soda” in the three and a half years I lived up there, and am still more likely to use “soda” now—as I’ve become accustomed to having to substitute that for the trademarked names in books I edit now.
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Shoot, around here if you get to the country eateries… which is basically known as a Mama’s type place, you’ll hear all kinds of things. Yonder there, gonna, ain’t so, etc. But I hated it when people would say Eckerds instead of Eckerd, which is now Rite Aid.
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Yep. And the EckerdS which was built right next door to the Krispy KremeS and across the street from the White CastleS on Thompson Lane near my house which then became a Rite AidS has since shut down.
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I live in Missouri and we do the S thing sometimes too, mostly for restaurants. I’ve never heard it for Walmart though. Sometimes I hear people refer to Walmart as Wally World and McDonald’s as Mickey D’s. I don’t know if that is unique to us or not. And we also say pop instead of soda. Although it seems anymore that I’m hearing soda used a lot more than when I was younger.
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Yep, MickyD’s and Wally World are pretty much universal, I believe.
Do y’all have Walmarkets up there? (Technically, “Walmart Marketplace”—Walmart’s attempt at a grocery store.) And do people pronounce (facetiously, of course) Target with a “French accent”—Tar-zhay?
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Do you mean it’s just a grocery store? Or just the fact that they include a grocery section?? We call them Supercenters when they include the grocery section (which I think is almost all of them anymore) Yep, Tar-zhay is used too. I forgot about that one.
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It’s just a grocery store: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart_Neighborhood_Market
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We do the “S’ thing some in MO.
Living ten years in NC, I did pick up some habits…like saying “hey” instead of “hello”. I didn’t even notice it until moving back to MO, when everyone said “Hello, how are you?” vs. “Hey, how’re you doing?”. And I did pick up y’all.
In NC there was a lot of “pocketbook” vs. “purse”, and “buggy” vs. “shopping cart”.
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I grew up saying “hi” and “you guys” in New Mexico, but after moving to Louisiana for college at age eighteen, I quickly adopted “hey” and “y’all” upon being branded a Yankee for saying “hi” and “you guys.”
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Rhode Island has amazing regional words, accents, and speech patterns. One of my favorites is “wicked” as an intensifier. “Wicked cool!” “Wicked awesome!”
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I heard “wicked” a lot in both Minnesota and Michigan. Maybe it has something to do with the wicked cold weather in all those states?
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I’ve been hearing wicked a lot lately – I thought it was generational – not regional.
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Well, I’m just a tad north of you in Kentucky, so yes, many people add an “S” to any store name, my dad “carries” people all the time (people got a hoot out of that when they lived in Wyoming for a year), and “Coke” is interchangeable with “cold drink,” which is actually pronounced “cole drink.” I lived in Indiana my last two years of high school. Needless to say, lunchtime was fun. I would have people talk to me just to hear what I would say back. Like “you-uns” was so much more hip than “y’all.” 🙂
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Hahahahaha great post! I know, I know, you want more than great post LOL so I’m gonna give it to you!
I’m from Southwest PA…we have a language all our own! 😛
Our town website even has a “dictionary”
http://www.perryopolis.com/adjunct.shtml
Here are a few of the most popular terms (yup I use them)
yinz- this is our version of “y’all”
jaggers- thorns or bushes with thorns
crick (as mentioned on one of the posts above)
redd up- it means clean up ex: I’m gonna redd up my room now, it’s messy.
worsh- ex: Worsh(Wash) your hands before you eat.
pop- (as mentioned above)
Stillers- NFL team aka The Pittsburgh Steelers
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“Redd-up”—I learned about that one on an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent when that phrase gave them the clue that a suspect was from Pennsylvania.
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Hahaha yeah and “yinz” is a sure bet you’re dealing with someone with ties to SWPA!
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I hate it when people say “Panera’s.” That’s the only one people do around here, though.
This isn’t really regional, but it drives me crazy when someone says “I have to go to the ATM machine.” Redundant (and repetitive.)
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In my hometown (the big city of McDonough, GA) people use the term “draw up” as a substitute for “shrink”. I had a cousin on an Alaskan cruise once ask the sales clerk at a store if a cotton shirt “was gonna draw up.” You can imagine the look he got…
The term “bare down” is also common for needing to place a book (or other hard surface) under a piece of paper before writing. “Can I have something to bare down on?” The hubby still mocks me for this one.
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I’m from NC, where we may as well paint an S on Kroger’s (They are owned by Kroger, right?). But in college in Utah, a history professor insisted that stupid Utahns originated it—”Nordstrom’s” was just evidence of how culturally backwards this place he chose to live and work was.
It’s pretty universal. Around here, they just gave everything an s at the end anyway—the grocery stores closest to my house are Macey’s, Albertson’s, Harmon’s and Smith’s. (The apostrophe usage, however, varies. Really, they should probably be s’, but many don’t use it at all.)
Walmarts, though, that’s bad. Trrble.
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I grew up in New England around people who dropped r’s on words “wahts fah dinnah”, said “ya” instead of “you”, “pahk tha cah” and added the letter r in places it didn’t belong, and often used “wicked” before everything (“this is wicked cold”; “I had a wicked fun time”). I sometimes revert back to my “New England speak” if I go back up there to visit family. My hubby laughs at some of the things that slip out of my mouth.
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In Louisiana, people also add an “s” to the end of names like Kroger, but not to Wal-Mart. I noticed one time in Houston that some people added the phrase “You know?” to the end of many statements.
A saying my sons and their friends said frequently when they were teenagers was “Red Neck Rule.” They said this anytime they dropped food on the ground. The “rule” was if it was on the ground for fewer than any number of seconds, you could eat it anyway. The number of seconds changed according to how silly they were being and therefore how long they left it on the floor. It could change from “10 second Red Neck Rule” to “90 second Red Neck Rule” if there were girls nearby to gross out or impress. Talk about an incentive for frequently scrubbing the floors!
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