No, I’m not talking about those bits of gray that have suddenly appeared on your head. (Though, come to think of it, I could use a session with my hair stylist about now.) I’m talking about the words and phrases you use that reveal where you grew up. The things you say that you picked up in your formative years and still continue to say without thinking about it.
Expressions are the most obvious of these. The southern part of the U.S. seems to have a particularly colorful set of them. Much more interesting than the ones I grew up with. My favorite southern expression is “so good it will make you want to slap your momma”. Jeff Foxworthy, on an episode of The American Baking Competition, told a somewhat befuddled Paul Hollywood that it meant that the food was so good that you’d slap your momma to get at it. Something that no good Southerner would do, of course. So the food must be terrific to make you want to act that way.
Then there are things like what you use as the generic name for Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, 7-Up, etc. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest where, at least at the time, “pop” was the generic term. Seems to be the same in the Midwest where my parents grew up. I quickly learned, however, that not everyone uses that phrase. When I moved down to the L.A. area to go to school, people made fun of me when I said “pop” so I changed to using “soda”, which no one laughs at. I haven’t said “pop” to mean soda in a very long time. By the way, I’ve also heard that in some areas of the U.S., “pop” is a term for beer.
I recently discovered something else that shows that I grew up in Washington state. I asked some people to look through the ARC for GHOSTS OF PAINTING PAST recently to find any mistakes so we could correct them for the final printing. I found a few myself, but someone else pointed out to me that I used “aid car” to mean ambulance, something that they’d never heard before. Honestly, I didn’t think anything about it. I use the word ambulance all of the time in speech. But “aid car” popped into the book. Seemed fine to me.
After a little googling, I discovered that “aid car” is very much a Washington state thing. In the Seattle area at least, the term is used to describe a vehicle dispatched to provide first aid, i.e. a public ambulance. The term ambulance is reserved for private ambulances.
I changed the term to ambulance because I didn’t want anyone to get hung up on an unusual term, especially since the book is set in Southern California not Seattle. But that made me realize that in the course of a day, I probably say other things that indicate where I grew up.
What about you? What terms/expressions/words do you say that are peculiar to your part of the world?
Well, I have to worry about Canadianisms when writing for American audiences, and the thing is, you just don't know what ISN'T familiar to other ears. I had an editor question what on earth I meant by the perfectly normal word "riding' when referring to a politician's constituency. Not a word used anywhere but Canada, apparently. Or perhaps Yorkshire?
ReplyDeleteActually, what I'm more concerned about is using terms I've used all my life that actually date me. But again, I don't know what they might be until someone stares at me and laughs.
I know what you mean, Susan. I'm sure I use terms that date me as well. Concerning when my main character is in her late twenties, an age I haven't been in quite some time. But she's at heart an old soul and she's picked up some things from her parents who are about my age. At least that's what I tell myself.
ReplyDeleteI once took a linguistics course and the professor said there was some academic who could tell within 50 miles where a person had been born simply by the words they used.
ReplyDeleteI've heard that, too, Charlotte. I'd be curious to see if they could pinpoint where I grew up.
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