Differences by Nancy L. Eady

 As a mystery writer, I look for tidbits I can use in creating clues and color. This search leads to particularized, weird pieces of knowledge that I am continually saving for the right story. 

For example, a young colleague of mine and his wife recently had a baby girl. He was telling an amusing story about how he thought officials had given her the wrong Social Security number because it didn’t start with a 4. I’ve known for years that Social Security numbers were assigned in part by region. 4 is the first number of Alabama Social Security numbers, and since I wasn’t born here, mine is different. But, as my friend found out, that practice was stopped in 2012, when the Social Security office started assigning numbers at random. So everyone who received a Social Security number before 2012 has a number that tells people where they were born. While that’s probably not something I can use yet, since the first year of randomly generated Social Security number holders are only 9 or 10, I’ve got the fact simmering in the back of my mind to use some day. 

Another type of regional identifier most people outside of Alabama aren’t aware of is that until recently, a person’s Alabama license plate number could tell you what county the car was registered in. Cars with license numbers beginning with “01” were from Jefferson County where Birmingham, the largest city in the state, is located. “02” license plates were issued to cars registered in Mobile County, the second largest county population and “03” license plates were issued to cars from Montgomery County, the third largest county population. Everyone else was alphabetical, so “04” license plates were issued in Autauga County, “61” plates were issued in Talladega County and “62” license plates came from Tallapoosa County. I will leave it to your imagination to decide whether the Legislature or the Governor changed the system because Madison County’s population, which includes the city of Huntsville, crept ahead of Montgomery’s population. Perhaps they wished to spare Montgomery as the state’s capital the indignity of having to surrender it’s “O3” for a much higher license plate number. 

Watching a YouTube video by Travelling Robert, a man who travels all over the county in a small travel trailer, I learned that the City of Pittsburgh apparently has its own dialect, locally known as “Pittsburgh-ese.” The American South has distinctive words as well. If you are about to go to the store, you are “fixin’ to” go to the store. And we have the ubiquitous “y’all” which essentially is the equivalent of second person plural for “you.” We also have invented a new verb tense, the heightened second person plural, which is “all y’all.” If you are inviting someone to a party, “y’all” would refer to the two people you are having a conversation with. If you want to include their families as well, then you use “all y’all.” Don’t laugh; it works for us. Children in North Carolina where my husband and I lived when we were first married didn’t sharpen their pencils, they trimmed them. Nor did they miss the bus. Instead, they were “bus left.” 

You can often tell the region of the country someone is from by how they refer to carbonated drinks. Here, when we ask for a Coke, we are not necessarily asking for an original Coca-Cola. Pretty much all soda is referred to as “Coke.” My cousins in Boston drank “pop” and my cousins in Illinois drank “soda.” I don’t remember what we called it in California. I was only in eighth grade at the time. 

Inserting little snippets of facts such as these into a story help enrich a setting or give the reader clues about a character. What regional or other unique facts have you used in your writing? What do you enjoy in other’s writing?

DIALECT AND COLLOQUIALISMS by Nancy L. Eady

 I live in the Deep South, the only area of the country where it is possible to convert a one-syllable word such as “bell” to the three-syllable “Be-uh-lll.” This lengthening of words is one reason the Southern American accent is also called the Southern drawl. Because the spoken word is the basis of most dialogue, I thought I’d share some of my observations.

Southern American English is spoken generally by natives in parts of Virginia, all of West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, the northern part of Florida, including the panhandle (the panhandle is also known here as “L.A.”, standing for “lower Alabama,” although I haven’t heard the phrase for a while), Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and probably Oklahoma. I say “probably Oklahoma” because I haven’t had the chance to spend any time in the state. As a general rule, neither Maryland nor Delaware natives speak with a Southern accent, even though they are below the Mason-Dixon line. Neither do people from the Virginia area surrounding Washington D.C. nor people from south Florida.

There are many regional variations, but I lack the phonetics background to describe them. However, the Louisiana Cajun accent is one of the most distinctive Southern dialects. The Cajun accent comes from people native to areas where the French Canadians settled in Louisiana after England took over Canada.

All Southern English dialects are spoken slowly. We don’t care to rush our words, partly because we believe that what we say is worth listening to and partly because, in the summer, at 98 degrees outside with 100% humidity, it’s just too hot to do anything quickly.

Another characteristic of Southern American English is the pronunciation of words like “you”—phonetically, down here, it rhymes with “chew.” I think God uses this as a tool to teach church music ministers in this area of the country humility—rare is the church concert indeed where at least one “yew” doesn’t slip through the cracks into the singing somewhere. We also use the word “y’all.”  “Y’all” is a contraction of the words “you all.” Before those of you in other areas of the country start laughing at the use of “y’all,” stop and reflect upon whether “y’all” doesn’t sound a bit better than other variations from other regions, such as “you’se guys.” Besides, it avoids our having to use “yew” too very often in normal conversation.

Southern American English also uses colorful colloquialisms. One region-wide expression worth sharing is “even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.” This expression is used to describe the surprising success of an individual in a field of endeavor that he or she has little experience in (or is just plain rotten at.)

Regional colloquialisms abound as well. In the areas of North Carolina where my husband and I lived when we were first married, children “trimmed” their pencils instead of sharpening them (we still sharpen them here in Alabama) and if they missed the bus, they had been “bus left.” In Alabama, if we are getting ready to go somewhere or do something, we are “fixin’ to” do it, as in “I am fixin’ to have some ice cream. Would y’all like some too?” Some of us “carry” people places, rather than drive them there. I use “fixin’ to” and “y’all” frequently but haven’t picked up “carry” for driving yet.

Native Southern American English speakers can spot a non-native speaker a mile away. This creates a great deal of frustration in the South when actors try to manufacture a Southern accent without doing their homework.   I have cringed through movies where an actor butchers the Southern accent.  It is a genuine pleasure to listen to the accent when an actor gets it right. One of the best Southern accents in a movie was Kevin Spacey’s accent in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”

I am not a native Southern American English speaker, although I have been learning it for over 40 years now. Anyone from any other region of the country would peg me as Southern, but as recently as two months ago, someone asked me, “You’re not from around here, are you?” (Note: To be “from around” a place means you were born and bred at that place.) It was the first time in years someone had said that to me, but he was correct.

One pleasant feature of Southern English is the phrase “bless her [or his] heart.” You can get away with saying anything about anyone else if you say it in a gentle, compassionate voice with a smile, and include the statement “bless his heart” somewhere in the sentence. For example, the statement, “Bless his heart, John Smith is crazy as a loon,” is perfectly acceptable and taken as concern rather than derogation. 

And we are the only region I know of that has invented a new verb tense. “You” is the second person singular, as in “Why don’t you call me?” “Y’all” is the second person plural, as in “Why don’t y’all come over to dinner?" However, “all y’all" is second person plural heightened tense, to be used when you are inviting large groups of people to do something instead of groups of five or less, as in asking the Waltons, “Why don’t all y’all come over to dinner?”

So, bless all y’all’s hearts, I’ll talk to you next Monday!

A Sandwich By Any Other Name

 I recently moved back to New England from Virginia and realized that I have forgotten how to speak the language.

When I was ordering lunch the other day, I asked the server for a tuna “sub.” She looked at me blankly. “You mean a grinder?”

Yes! A grinder! How could I forget? Just when I think I’m settling in, some little detail like that pops up to remind me that I am not in Virginia any more.

I started thinking about these differences in regional dialect and discovered a great resource for writers who want to make sure their characters are talking like natives.

The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) http://dare.wisc.edu has been in the works since 1962. It was the brainchild of the American Dialect Society and the English Department at the University of Washington-Madison. Staff at the university has toiled for fifty years to compile a dictionary of all the regionalisms that make people from different states incomprehensible to each other.

DARE’s website is fun to play with, and is a valuable resource for writers. There are dropdown menus that make it easy for you to choose your state and explore some of the lingo that your potential characters may speak.

So if your hero is hungry, he can order a hero in New York City, or a po’boy in New Orleans, or a hoagie in Pennsylvania. Who knew that in southeastern New York, such a sandwich is called a “wedge?” When he is done eating a peach, depending on where he is from, he will toss away the seed, pit, stone, or kernel.

The dictionary is fun to browse. Most of us know that soda and pop mean the same thing, but who knew that a dust bunny is called a “dust dolly” in New Jersey?

Are there any regionalisms that only folks in your neck of the woods use?