Flyover America

Pop? Soda? Coke?

Hoagie? Grinder? Sub?

They’re about as basic as it gets when it comes to American regionalisms. Yet they’re still very entertaining to discuss. Just watch what happens in the comments sections (hopefully it happens) when I declare the answers to be soda and sub. (Please, if you disagree, just don’t hurl your hoagie at me.) If you’ve ever gotten into heated battle about (or just discussed) either one of those, then you’re going to want to meet Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, the hosts of A Way With Words. The public radio show is “Car Talk for language. People call us about their questions and peeves and just observations about language, things they’ve always wanted to know or things they heard on television last night, and we help them get to the bottom of it,” says Grant. Adds Martha: “We talk just about everything having to do with language. That means grammar, punctuation, slang, regionalisms, word origins, and usage. A lot of times we’ll get couples who have had an ongoing [word] fight for years…or there’s a dispute in somebody’s office. They call us and we make our pronoucenements.”

One topic that totally tickles the dandy duo (who are probably gagging over that icky alliteration) is American regionalisms. “What I love about regionalisms is that language is a reflection of culture and in terms of regionalisms it’s not just the poetry of language, it also reflects migration patterns,” says Martha.

“When people come up with new words they’re almost never new words completely sprung out the earth fully formed. They’re almost always derived from something that already existed or modified or they indifferently applied grammar rules,” says Grant.

It’s also a very personal topic for both Bs. MB grew up down south and GB is “half-Southern.”

Says Grant: “One of the features of my dialect — southern Ozark Mountain — is that the past tense of to steal is stoled. People shudder when they hear me say it. If you look at the surveys that have been done of this, it’s very consistent in my part of the country. The only way I would know that it’s out of the ordinary is that people say it’s supposed to be stolen. I take a little bit of personal pride in my dialect. I’m not going to speak Harvard English just because somebody else wants me to.”

As for the all-time oh I love it so regionalism for each?

Well, pork steaks, “a cut of meat almost unknown out of Missouri,” are top of mind for Grant. “Don’t you just want to get you some? They’re usually cooked in red sauce, either as shown in a large container, or better, you might marinate them for a while first, throw them on the grill and then as they’re cooking, you keep slathering the sauce, so that it kind of accretes like wax does on a wick when you’re making candles, or like the layers of paint that get added on an old house over the decades. The key, in any case, is not to do any of that half-assed barbecue where the meat is cooked separately from the sauce and then added at the end! That’s just wrong and anybody with any sense knows it.”

And for Martha? She’s not letting go of tump — accidently knock over — any time soon. Use it in a sentence please Martha: “Don’t tump over the canoe! or OMG, he just tumped a whole cooler of beer into the lake. It’s found throughout much of the south, and I suppose I cling to it with pride because I’ll never forget using this word in upstate New York, only to find people actually laughed at me because they’d never heard such a thing. Now any time I hear a Southerner say it, it feels like home, and I want to give them a big ol’ high five in solidarity.”

Tags: language, regionalisms