Oh Craigslist, You Amuse Me So!

[rebelcowboysnb]

I would not be surprised if I saw chester drawers in a book wrote in Ga. I have read lots of books that had the regional language wrote in to them. I have a book somewhere about farming that I can reed just fine but my family in Ohio needed me to translate about 50 words of every page.

On this forum I try not to do that as many people on here would be lost as to what I was saying. If I am talking on a local form I will type that way.

 

[vehve]

I would not be surprised if I saw chester drawers in a book wrote in Ga. I have read lots of books that had the regional language wrote in to them. I have a book somewhere about farming that I can reed just fine but my family in Ohio needed me to translate about 50 words of every page.

On this forum I try not to do that as many people on here would be lost as to what I was saying. If I am talking on a local form I will type that way.

If it's a part of a characters vocabulary, I don't see anything wrong with using it when quoting the character in a book. That's a way of making stories more believable.

That's exactly what I'm saying, you need to speak to your audience.

Now I am apparently needed in the couch, so I shall stop participating in this lovely argument about language, but I've enjoyed this discussion, it's nice to learn about terminology in different parts of the world. And I apologize if I came across as a bit stuck up, that's something I need to work on. Have a nice evening everyone.

 

[rebelcowboysnb]

Cmom, I have to admit I got a laugh about the Untied States. (Don't take this as offense, just some good fun)

I dont take offense, I just take issue with the word "proper." Its all relative to where an when.

My favorite part of traveling is hearing the language change from town to town an state to state. Louisiana has a great accent. My Scottish friend has a good one too.

 

[cmom]

Quote: In the North East U.S. the term tonic is probably used more by the older folks like me. Most of the younger people I think call soft drinks, soda.

 

[MeepBeep]

Define proper English? The King James Bible? How the Queen of England speaks now? The US does not speak the same language as England. I think we can all agree that the language of the US is not the English you hear in England.

Fact is that language is fluid an there is no black an white, right an wrong. It differs not only from country to country but from region to region an threw out time. English being one of the worst languages for not following any set rules. A word is a word if one person can use it when talking to a stranger in the same community an reasonably expect them to know its meaning. The Appalachians are full of words like that that are common here that have not filtered out in to the rest of the country yet. Life would be pretty boring if regional dialects did not happen. I love being able to tell where someone is from based off how they talk an the words they use.

There are still established standards that define proper/standard American English and distinguish it from the slang or region dialects used in isolated areas... Yes, the language is ever evolving and sometimes 'slang or regional dialects' become accepted into the established standards, but not always and many times when they are accepted they are still denoted as 'non-standard'... For example "ain't" is now accepted as an non-standard contraction, but you will rarely if ever see it classified as a formal or standard contraction, even though it has been accepted...

 

[Cass]

There are still established standards that define proper/standard American English and distinguish it from the slang or region dialects used in isolated areas... Yes, the language is ever evolving and sometimes 'slang or regional dialects' become accepted into the established standards, but not always and many times when they are accepted they are still denoted as 'non-standard'... For example "ain't" is now accepted as an non-standard contraction, but you will rarely if ever see it classified as a formal or standard contraction, even though it has been accepted...

x2

And I have been in the Southern part of the United States. They speak a totally different language down there. LOL Not wrong, just totally different than the language my teachers inparted to me while I was in public school.

(and I have NEVER heard anyone call a piece of furnature "chester drawers" no matter what part of the country I lived in or visited....so this is a new one to add to my vocab)

 

[oldrooster]

Quote:
I have heard the term chest of drawers most often, and "chester drawers" rarely as slang, usually because of the mispronunciation of that phrase. A dresser is similar to a chest of drawers, but the dresser is shorter (about waist high for a six foot tall person or a little shorter) and the chest of drawers is about as high as the bicep area of a person of said 6 foot in height both can have mirrors, or be mirror less. usually your grandmother is correct most dressers have mirrors. and chest of drawers usually have none.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

In the North East U.S. the term tonic is probably used more by the older folks like me. Most of the younger people I think call soft drinks, soda.

I remember in Junior High School having a boyfriend from the Midwest who took offense to the fact that in the Pacific Northwest soft drinks were pop or soda pop. He constantly kept "correcting" me into saying "soda."

It was ridiculous.

I find many of the Northeastern US accents unintelligible because they omit so many sounds when they speak and you sort of have to puzzle out whether they meant park or pack or peak. I could never take the Kennedy family seriously because to me they sound like foppish cartoon characters. Then again, I spent part of my childhood forty miles or so from Salem, OR where the traditional accent was often mistaken for southern. I think it is vanishing, if it is not already gone; but when I was growing up in the 1960s, you could hear several different accents between Portland and Eugene.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

Quote:
And then there is the chifferobe.

 

[oldrooster]

Quote: In the North East U.S. the term tonic is probably used more by the older folks like me. Most of the younger people I think call soft drinks, soda.

I have rarely heard here in the mid west the phrase tonic, unless it is referred to as an alcoholic beverage (in terms of a beverage) like a gin and tonic, or whiskey and tonic. But that being said I have heard the phrase tonic, used as a medical (or quasi-medical term) meaning a drink with medicine added (like someone whom has trouble swallowing pills might put something like a sleeping pill in warm milk) or a medicine like cough syrup might be called a tonic of sorts, and sometimes loosely interchanged with the term elixir. But even then it was usually used in old TV shows then for the medical references. One MIGHT say in my area for either a home made or over the counter medicine as a tonic or elixir. an example "I made a thick tonic of honey lemon and tea for my sore throat." "Hand me that elixir (meaning cough syrup)" might also be said.....