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Saturday, 5 April 2008
0812 - Words meme
I grew up in Houston, and lived there until my forties...
1. A body of water, smaller than a river, contained within relatively narrow banks: creek or bayou
2. What the thing you push around the grocery store is called: grocery cart
3. A metal container to carry a meal in: lunchbox
4. The thing that you cook bacon and eggs in: skillet
5. The piece of furniture that seats three people: couch
6. The device on the outside of the house that carries rain off the roof: gutter
7. The covered area outside a house where people sit in the evening: porch
8. Carbonated, sweetened, non-alcoholic beverages: Coke (even if it's Pepsi)
9. A flat, round breakfast food served with syrup: pancakes
10. A long sandwich designed to be a whole meal in itself: po-boy
11. The piece of clothing worn by men at the beach: bathing suit
12. Shoes worn for sports: tennis shoes
13. Putting a room in order: clean up
14. A flying insect that glows in the dark: lightning bug (although I never saw one until I came to Minnesota)
15. The little insect that curls up into a ball: doodle bug
16. The children's playground equipment where one kid sits on one side and goes up while the other sits on the other side and goes down: teeter-totter
17. How do you eat your pizza? with my hands unless it lacks sufficient structural integrity
18. What's it called when private citizens put up signs and sell their used stuff? a garage sale
19. What's the evening meal? dinner
20. The thing under a house where the furnace and perhaps a rec room are? the basement (though, again, I never had one until I came to Minnesota)
21. What do you call the thing that you can get water out of to drink in public places? water fountain
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Comments:
This is a silly one. Especially since there's usually multiple words I've used to describe most things. I've been in colorado most of my life though. :)
1. Creek (pronounced more like crik), stream...
2. concur
3. concur
4. concur
5. couch or sofa
6. concur
7. Porch (for the front usually) or Deck (for the back, usually) Since air conditioning though, most people don't actually sit on the porch, and the deck is usually used for eating out doors.
8. Pop or Sodapop, usually. Softdrink occasionally. Coke if it's actually a coke. It's more erratic these days than it used to be.
9. concur
10. Sub. I hadn't really even seen these until I saw my first Subway in Moab, UT though.
11. Trunks, or shorts usually.
12. concur
13. concur, mostly.
14. firefly. I've never actually seen one.
15. Rollypolly or pillbug.
16. concur
17. Concur.
18. yard sale or garage sale. Usually depending on if its in a yard or a garage. Since they're usually out in the yard, it'd be a yard sale most of the time.
19. dinner or supper, depending on if one was at home or with the grandparents.
20. Basement, if you live there. Cellar, if it's used for storing canned goods and needs a pump to keep it dry.
21. concur.
I'll just give you the diffs.
8. Soda
10. Subway | Hoagie
14. Firefly.
15. Roly-poly
This kind of thing fascinates linguists. I have a textbook that shows a map of variations of a few words all over the U.S.
I grew up in Charleston WV, currently living in Houston (actually, an outlying county). The interesting thing about some of these items is that many of my friends had more "quaint" terms and pronunciations than my family did. For instance, where I lived we had a creek run through the back yard, but my friend who lived farther up the hollow had a "crick" that ran through his back yard (and it wasn't a hollow for him, but rather a "holler". a grocery cart was a "buggy" for him and a lunchbox was a Lunch pail"
1. creek (rhymes with peak, not with pick)
2. grocery cart
3. lunchbox
4. frying pan
5. couch. or if it's smaller/petite: loveseat.
6. gutter
7. porch. or if it is enclosed by screens or windows: patio.
8. soda (occasionally "soda pop," or on rare occasions just "pop". sometimes just call it a Coke, even if it is a brand other than Coca-cola brand, but not if it is Pepsi)
9. pancake
10. sub, submarine, or hoagie
11. bathing suit, swim suit, or swim trunks
12. tennis shoes
13. clean up
14. lightning bug
15. potato bug or peel bug
16. teeter-totter
17. with my hands unless it's really greasy and i don't have any napkins
18. yard sale or garage sale
19. supper (most often referred to as dinner though, but since dinner was generally used to refer to the largest meal of the day, "dinner" tended to refer to lunch on sundays)
20. basement or occasionally "cellar"
21. water fountain
Most of this applies in PA too, with the exception of 8 (answer, "soda," until you get close to Pittsburgh, then it's "pop"), 10 (answer, "hoagie," especially in Philadelphia), 12 (either "sneakers" or "running shoes," depending upon the number of special features packed into the footwear) and 21 (answer "drinking fountain," usually).
I've heard different terms for 11, so maybe there's a generational thing going on, and I have no idea what kind of bug you're talking about in 15.
Oh, and we don't have bayous, which I equate more to "swamp" than I do to a body of water of any type. :-) |
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