Frosting or Icing?
Frosting or Icing? Firefly or “Peenie Wallie”? Brew-Thru, Beverage Barn, or “I Have Never Heard of This Concept”?
I have taken this regional dialect quiz from N.C. State University four times in the last week (the short version changes up its questions), and it has pegged me exactly every time as a person who grew up in Houston. That is crazy! Continental Americans: can it pin you down, too?
This quiz overloads if too many people are on it at once, so if you can’t get to it, a perhaps even more interesting substitute is the distribution map created from the answers to each question. Did you know that, in a few coastal parts of New England, people say “Mary,” “merry” and “marry” with different vowels for each word? I also had always thought all Texans said “feeder” for the access road to the highway (“freeway” for me, incidentally), but apparently it’s just Southeast Texas. And it appears that in my new home of Michigan, the night before Halloween is called “devil’s night”!