So I was born and raised in Sylacauga, Alabama, which is about an hour south of Birmingham...that's Bir-ming-HAM, not BUMmingum, as in England. Sylacauga is also the hometown of Jim Nabors.
If you've ever seen the Andy Griffith Show, you can imagine how I used to sound. I'm ashamed to say that the loud sound coming from a police car (pronounced PO'lice by my dad) was pronounced si-REEN at my house....till I went to medical school in Mobile (where the accents are Southern but hoity-toity, if you know what I mean) and smartened up. Another funny thing is that when I moved to New Orleans for fellowship, I was repeatedly noted to "not be from around here" by people, and one attending said, "What a beautiful accent! Are you British?" Then I spoke again, and I'll be she was embarrassed. (I told her that Vivien Leigh who played Scarlett O'Hara was British, so it was a common mistake - ha!) That's the extent of my accentual influences, so let's get to it.
The words are:
Aunt, Route, Wash, Oil, Theater, Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, Sure, Data, Ruin, Crayon, Toilet, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Spitting image, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Syrup, Pajamas, Caught
And these are the questions:
What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
What is the bug that when you touch it, it curls into a ball?
What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?
What do you call gym shoes?
What do you say to address a group of people?
What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?
What do you call your grandparents?
What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket? (Drew said, "What's a supermarket?" We call it a grocery store.)
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?
What is the thing you use to change the TV channel?
Come on - you know you say caught (cawt) differently than I do, so figure out that webcam on your laptop and give it a shot!
9 comments:
We didn't have crayons, we had colors. And, it's a buggy. I'm married to a guy originally from Ohio, sometimes I don't think we speak the same language.
Robbie
I am from Nashville, TN, born and bred. I pronounce the words exactly as you do and, with the exception of the grandparent thing, my answers to the questions were the same as yours. My mother's maiden name is Honey so my grandparents were Mama Honey and Papa Honey.
Love your post. Too funny! I have a pretty thick southern accent. I come from a long line of thick southern accents. Using Siri is training me a bit to not make every word a contraction. I don't know how I've done it, but I have seemed to have raised a little yankee. My daughter has rebelled the southern accent thing and complains about it all the time. I think she is an 80 year old retired English teacher trapped in a 15 year old girl's body. She says that she wants to go to a college far away where people don't say y'all. I love a good "y'all". We joke around the house that her favorite sentence is: "Y'all ain't fixin' to do nuthin', bless your heart." I tell her to study hard and get a good scholarship to pay for out of state tuition. Lots of places other than the south have local pronunciations of words, common sayings and there are rednecks of different sort everywhere you go. She'll figure that out.
Do you drive him crazy with your accent? Dean thought "pining" was a Sylacauga word till I showed it to him in the dictionary!
That's sweet! (I made a pun unintentionally.). For some reason, we went with first names for one set, so it was Papaw Clyde and Mamaw Clyde.....she didn't seem to mind.
How funny....and yet good for her! You're right about everybody's eccentricities - when we lived in NOLA they all said "making groceries" for grocery shopping.
Actually, Vic has been in the South, Atlanta, Birmingham and Gulf Shores, for 50 years, far longer than he was in Cleveland, Ohio (24 years). He does say "y'all, but it sounds funny.
Robbie
I love it!! Houston was so metro, Med school almost trained my accent out of me. It's slowly coming back...
That's funny, Katie. Dean has warned me that other doctors judge me by my accent, but I've always hoped they're pleasantly surprised when they realize I have a brain. I went to UAB last year to meet the cardiologists I'd talked to on the phone for 12 years, and one guy said, "You're not at all what I expected." I said, "You were expecting a shoeless woman with half her teeth, weren't you?" He refused to answer....
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