Local speech that drives you crazy

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that enjoys cooking.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
Yo is gang slang? I thought it was an Italian cultural kind of thing. Yo Vinnie, "Yo Adrian". Maybe the way it's interpreted is local as well. It did seem to catch on with a lot of my Italian friends after the Rocky movie, whereas not so much before, or at least not that I noticed.
 
It annoys me when someone refers to details as the 'pacifics' of an issue. If you aks me there are a lot more examples.
 
Not much really gets to me, but there is one thing that does and that's referring to a time of day and adding "a.m." or "p.m." For example, in the case of someone inviting guests to a brunch and saying, "It's going to be at 10:30 a.m., in the morning." Well, isn't "a.m.," by definition, in the morning. You get what I mean.

Just a little peeve from the "Department of Redundancy Department.":wacko:
 
I was always told cool beans was a MA thing.

Interesting. I've lived in both MA and NJ (if you add the time in both up it comes to ) almost 30 years, and have never heard that phrase until this moment! :ermm:

But does anyone remember back in the day before "like" became the beginning and middle of almost every phrase and comment? That's attributible to the Valley Girls of Southern California. and I still find it REEEEpulsive. :wacko:
 
I agree with many of the previous posters, especially regarding the use of the word "like" but the mis-pronunciation of one word in particular really gets me going. I don't know if this is a regional mistake or if it has some other origin. My apologies to our many Canadian members but the word is "asphalt" not "ashphalt"! I have met Canadians in or from BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba ( not sure about the east) who all pronounce asphalt with an "h" after the "s", my DH included errm...... at least he did until I pointed it out. I have even heard newscasters mis-pronounce asphalt. Can anyone offer an explanation for the mis-pronunciation?

Many Canadians pronounce asphalt as "ash-falt" /ˈæʃfɒlt/. This pronunciation is also common in Australian English, but not in General American English


I could give you the link, but there is a lot of extraneous matter to wade through.

The words that bother me are most often things like, "irregardless" or "orientated". I try not to be too judgmental because I'm aware that language is ever evolving and that the verbal language changes before the written language. I do get my snot in a knot occasionally, but its more often because of persistent misspellings.

I know that in some areas of the US the word "yins" is common, but its not in common usage and to TYPE dialect is really irritating.

Rant over.
 
The words that bother me are most often things like, "irregardless" or "orientated". I try not to be too judgmental because I'm aware that language is ever evolving and that the verbal language changes before the written language. I do get my snot in a knot occasionally, but its more often because of persistent misspellings.

Those words also raise the hair on the back of my neck.

Although language is constantly evolving, sadly much of the evolution comes from folks like you and me writhing in private when errors like the above are committed. Soon, if enough newscasters (prominently placed supposedly intelligent people) continue to use incorrect words, they become "acceptable" to whomever is writing the dictionary these days and in they go! YIKES! :ohmy:

Maybe my biggest "nail-scrapers" though, are mispronounciations like "goverment" for goverNment, and "Febuary" for FebRuary.
 
Re:

I live in Appalachia so I hear things that stop me in my tracks until I realize what it is
that has been said.

I was once riding on my motorcycle and stopped to ask for some directions. The farmers daughter was another part of the reason. Lovely girl.

But after I asked how far it was to....... she smiled and said, "oh thass jus two jumps a squeek an a hollar down the road" ! I was wondering if we were still speaking ENGLISH at that point. So, I smiled and thanked her and fired up and motored on noticing her waving in my mirror.

Sure enough there were two rising knolls (jumps) a creek I forded as it was almost dry, and a hollow where the road branched off and ran into. And just a few hundred feet ahead was the little General Store.

But even in this area there are many dialects of this kind of language.
 
Last edited:
My parents both say: waRsh. Wash has no R!! Either does the state or the name of our nation's capital. Not sure how you can butcher a four-letter word like that ...:LOL: My brother and I both tease them about it but it hasn't made either of them change the way they say it.
 
Zereh said:
My parents both say: waRsh. Wash has no R!! Either does the state or the name of our nation's capital. Not sure how you can butcher a four-letter word like that ...:LOL: My brother and I both tease them about it but it hasn't made either of them change the way they say it.

I was able to break DH of the warshing habit by using public humiliation and ridicule. (No, actually I used the "point and chortle" method.). So far he done real good.
 
One of the most annoying things I frequently hear is the word OFTEN pronounced as OFF-TEN. The word is pronounced OFF-EN. It has a silent T, just like listen, fasten, and soften! Would you go to the grocery store and ask for fabric SOF-TENNER?
 
Last edited:
One of the most annoying things I frequently hear is the word OFTEN pronounced as OFF-TEN. The word is pronounced OFF-EN. It has a silent T, just like listen, fasten, and soften! Would you go to the grocery store and ask for fabric SOF-TENNER?


SHUTUP!! Well slap me down and roll me across the floor!!! You don't pronounce the t in often??? When did that start???!:glare:
I got to get away from all these "country proper speakin' folks"!!!:mad:


:LOL::)
 
SHUTUP!! Well slap me down and roll me across the floor!!! You don't pronounce the t in often??? When did that start???!:glare:
I got to get away from all these "country proper speakin' folks"!!!:mad:


:LOL::)

This got me thinking. It depends on in what context I use the word on how I use it. Examples- "I ofen think of you" "How often do you come here?". I have no clue why I do this.:ermm:
 
One of the most annoying things I frequently hear is the word OFTEN pronounced as OFF-TEN. The word is pronounced OFF-EN. It has a silent T, just like listen, fasten, and soften! Would you go to the grocery store and ask for fabric SOF-TENNER?

Pronouncing the "t" is perfectly acceptable.


'Often' was pronounced with a t-sound until the 17th century, when a pronunciation without the
emotion-62.gif
came to predominate in the speech of the educated, in both North America and Great Britain, and the earlier pronunciation fell into disfavor. Common use of a spelling pronunciation has since restored the [t] for many speakers, and today /ˈɔ
thinsp.png
fən/[aw-fuh
thinsp.png
n] and /ˈɔf
thinsp.png
tən/[awf-tuh
thinsp.png
n] or /ˈɒf
thinsp.png
ən/[of-uh
thinsp.png
n] and [of-tuh
thinsp.png
n] exist side by side. Although it is still sometimes criticized, 'often' with a /t/[t] is now so widely heard from educated speakers that it has become fully standard once again.
 
i can still remember playground taunts of "you can't say ain't. ain't ain't a word coz ain't ain't in the dictionary!" well, in 1961, webster's third edition, amid controversy, included the word "ain't" in its dictionary, thus finally legitimizing a word not recognized as proper english language, but due to its persistent common usage over the years.
 
There are two that drive me crazy. The first one is the misuse of the word "obviously". People say it all the time when there is nothing obvious about what they are saying.

The second is the word "decimate". Decimate originally meant to reduce by a tenth. If an amry was decimated it meant they lost one out of every ten men.
 
OK, that's a cool one GB. How are people using decimate incorrectly around you? I haven't thought of that one before.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top Bottom