Living in the Midwest brings to the mind of a Western Pennsylvanian the odd quirks in her own regional dialect.
Particularly to a girl hailing from Erie -- the land of oxroast, pepperoni balls, and uninflected questions that come out sounding like irritable statements -- the Midwestern speech patterns are nasaly and off-puttingly pleasant. (Don't be offended! It's an all-American dialect here, and I love it.) "College" sounds like "callege," for example. And everyone's speech pattern is so friendly. They actually ASK questions here. And they'll say hello to almost anyone. I'm accustomed to greeting only people I like, and glancing or grunting at strangers and acquaintances.
So some differences already exist; but the idioms are what really intrigue me. I've noticed certain things, certain terms and phrases, that didn't travel from Western Pennsylvania to northern Indiana. "Gum bands" never made it. "Red up the room" died before Ohio. "Run the sweeper" gets you skeptical glances from people imagining brooms hooked up to motors, while "my hair needs cut" or "my room needs cleaned" or "my brakes need fixed" makes English majors from other regions cough.
But these, while a little odd, seldom break down communiation completely. Hearing one of them might require a little more concentration or forbearance on the part of the non-PA-er, but the point goes across the gap and interprets itself well.
The kicker, the one that knocks the neurons all askew and drops an anvil on conversational understanding, appears to be one of the primary phrases of my childhood: "it's a horse apiece."
I've said it indifferently once or twice, once to a friend who was born and raised in Michigan, and once to a friend who's more or less from the East Coast, and both times I received a flat, "What's that mean?"
"You don't know?" I was incredulous (and probably looked insane).
"No. I've never heard that before."
"Oh." I had to pause, and came up with, "Well. It means two things are the same."
A synonymous phrase is "half a dozen of one, six of the other," which to the Western PA mind takes WAY too long to say. So when a friend calls to ask if you'd rather go out for pizza or Chinese, if you don't care either way, you grunt, "horse apiece." Or if someone asks you for advice on which of two courses of action to take, and both options are grim, what do you say? "Horse apiece."
Where does it come from? I have no idea. A quick google search identified some old gambling game called "horse," the rules of which I didn't understand; or trying to select the best of two bad ways to get to one place on horseback, both of which will ruin the horse before you get there. Apparently the phrase was first found in a DARE dictionary in 1980, but related phrases go back to as far as 1846; and none of these references identified a region of origin.
Which leaves me curious: Has anyone else ever heard, or used this phrase? Where? Is it limited to Western PA, or are there pockets of use elsewhere in the U.S.?
In a land where English is one of the most common languages, it's sometimes startling to be brought up short only four hundred or so miles away when someone asks you to translate a childhood phrase you just used.
Another reason why I love my native state. Even if people say our grammar needs fixed.
9 comments:
I've never heard that phrase. I've had people in Boston (and now Chicago) give me blank stares over my local sayings too. One that apparently hasn't left Maryland is our particular use of the word "pressed," as in "Girl! You are so pressed." I've also gotten strange looks from the saying things like "I looked like a hot mess" and "She looks to'e up from the floo' up." :D
"Pressed" is a new one! But my friend John, who lives in South Jersey, has acquainted me with "hot mess" and "to'e up from the floo' up."
I LOVE dialects!
C'mon people! Tell me more!
Dan would constantly confuse me with references to the sweeper during school. Because growing up, a sweeper was just that: a fake vacuum. The kind that doesn't have a motor, but is still encased in some kind of box ... I'm not really sure if they still exist, but I know they 'swept' up debris into a container.
So every time he said we should use the sweeper on the room (something he said frequently ... something I did infrequently), I assumed he meant that thing ... not an actual vacuum cleaner.
Also confusing: "Ten minutes of..." versus "Ten minutes 'til..." That damned phrase had me constantly assuming I was late to every scheduled anything.
As far as any North Idaho dialects, I'm told I don't speak from 'around here' ('around here' meaning Western PA ... or other places), but I can't point to many specific colloquialisms. I do know that I used say 'flag' funny (with a long A ... something I occasionally drop into, but have mostly eradicated), but that probably largely stems from our proximity to Canada and my inate ability/curse to half-assedly absorb others' accents.
Hahahaha, I know about the time thing! Even more confusing when we cut out the word "minutes" and just say "ten of."
We like to speak economically around here.
And I'm totally picking up the Midwestern flaat nasal "a." Maybe it's a proximity to Canada in Erie too...my people pick up other people's accents rather fluidly as well.
Unless they're from Pittsburgh. Which I'm proud to say is its own little pocket of dialect out of the whole United States. It only runs up to encompass Erie, which is a bubble of Pittsburgh dialect in a sweeping-down-from-the-Great-Lakes Chicago dialect monopoly.
Having never lived more than 50 miles from where I was born, I rarely encounter phrases of my own that are confusing to others, although I have been called on dropping "to be" at least once.
A fun game I like to play in class is listening to people talk and trying to determine which region they are from. I'm not very good at it, unless the person in question is from Philadelphia or New York. I hear those two a lot and they can be pretty distinct.
Yeah, like "whutter" for "water."
My editor (the person who gets paid to double-check my grammar) hails from Pittsburgh and is continually saying that the copier needs fixed or the report needs printed. It drives me to distraction.
Your post got me trying to think of some North Jersey colloquialisms for you, but sadly the only examples that kept coming to mind were things that outsiders THINK people from Jersey say. Like Joizy. We don't. And "fuggedaboudit" (forget about it). Possibly some truth to that one, in that it may once have been uttered fifty years ago.
I guess there are a couple things we say. When we say "the city," we mean Manhattan, period. Not Trenton, not Newark, not Philadelphia. "I'm going into the city tomorrow." We don't talk about going to the Jersey shore. We say "down the shore" (whether our destination happens to be up or down from where we are). "I'm going down the shore for spring break." We have a distinctive pronunciation of the word "orange." It's kind of like "ah-range." And we do kind of say cawfee for coffee. But not as exaggeratedly as you might think.
I love dialects too!
I always prided myself in thinking I didn't speak like a Pittsburgher, but at some point in college someone brought up that I also drop my "to be". I never even realized it or knew it was wrong. Now I work with a fellow English major who is not originally from this area and I feel like a moron anytime I say it... which thankfully is less often now that I'm thinking about it more... but I'm sure I still say it more than I should. Maybe I need one of those shock collars around my neck so that people can zap me anytime they hear me say it. I'm a bad English major. Haha.
Oh, just thought of another one.
Anyone use "s/he doesn't have the sense God gave a goose"?
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