Separated by a common language...

When an alumni magazine arrived a few weeks ago an advertisement titled "Winter is Coming" caught my attention (see photo). The ad was promoting sales for a combination "beanie and scarf set" with the Southern Illinois University logo and colors. I said to my wife, "Whoever wrote this ad is not from southern Illinois. Everyone I knew growing up in southern Illinois would have called those two items in the advertisement "a toboggan and a muffler." And that got me thinking: though we all speak a common language in the U.S., how we use the language varies greatly. We often fail to communicate because we are separated by a common language.

In the 55 years my wife and I have been married, we've lived in eight states and 22 different places in those states. We've lived, literally, on both coasts, in the north and south regions and in the middle of the U.S. I've thought often about the differences in language we've experienced in those places. Here are a few examples of differences in word usages and intended meanings that we found interesting and many times, confusing.

Food and drink names vary by region as well as how mealtimes are named

Our first living away from the Midwest (Illinois, me, and Iowa for my wife) was a move to Georgia. Of course the accent was different but so were the foods and how they described certain foods. We learned early at our first breakfast in a café that when ordering a glass of milk one must specify "sweet milk" if they didn't want a glass of buttermilk.

An unusual but tasty dish in Georgia is Brunswick stew. The grade school where my wife was hired had a faculty dinner of pulled pork barbeque and a side dish of stew: a combination of chicken, beef and pork chopped very fine in a tomato base with vegetables. Historically, Brunswick stew was "made with what you had available," which early on could have been squirrel, rabbit or both. There are famous "Q and Stew" places where barbequed pulled pork and Brunswick stew is the major menu item.

In that same regional vein are the "catfish lodges." A family style eatery famous among University of Georgia students was the Swamp Guinea, a fish lodge out in the country.

Featuring week night specials it always attracted students with big appetites and little money. In the Midwest to describe someone as a swamp guinea was an insult.

In Appalachia, where I worked for a coal company operating several underground mines, we learned a hot dog was always a chili dog unless otherwise specified. And on a first visit to North Dakota, a member of the group interviewing my wife for a job as a pastor said, "When we get done here we'll have some bars and coffee." I pulled him aside and said, "What's a bar?" He explained and laughed when I told him, "Where we came from we just called them 'little baked things.'" It was in North Dakota I first heard the term hotdish, to Midwesterners a casserole.

A uniquely named regional drink in Montana is the 'whiskey ditch'-a whiskey cut with water. We'd never heard that term before. Which reminds me, where I grew up the opening along the highway to catch runoff water was a "ditch," in the west and upper Midwest I learned those are "borrow pits." And here in Blaine County a cattle guard is an auto pass down in the Bear Paws.

And just a word about meal times and how they are called by different names-often different even in the same region. Almost everyone has been confused when someone said, "Come over for dinner" and had to ask, "Is that at noon or in the evening?" A new one in North Dakota was "a little lunch"-that's a snack farm wives used to take to the fields mid-morning when workers needed a little pick-me-up. Now it's more of a coffee break with snacks and not always in the field. In Iowa, my father-in-law talked about 'little breakfast'-when the kids would grab a biscuit or sausage patty to eat on the way out to do morning chores. A regular breakfast followed after chores were done.

Unique words for common things

How about the way we greet each other? I don't hear a lot of Montanans saying, "Howdy," but that greeting is associated with the west. In the south, generally folks say, "Hey" as a greeting. In North Dakota, it would polite to say, "So, how's it going, then?" The weirdest greeting I've encountered was in Appalachia where the miners greeted each other as "Honey." The first time a big, coal- dusted miner asked me, "Honey, are you lost?" I just about did lose it.

Or, what about something so common as a pickup (truck)? In certain areas a pickup is a truck as are SUVs-in Washington state). I worked for a farmer in North Dakota and told him I'd be bringing my truck (A Chevy S10). When I showed up at the field he nearly fell down laughing. To him a truck was something used to haul grain, and large quantities of it. In Wyoming a pickup was generally called a rig. Just this week a neighbor here in Chinook mentioned he was taking his outfit to haul something.

Speaking of vehicles: what do you call the place on the dashboard where you keep maps and stuff? The official name, as best I can determine, is a glove box (referring back to the old days of open vehicles and the need to protect the driver's hands), but in the south it was a dash pocket. In Iowa, the space between the back window and the back of the rear seat is called a back lean.

And I ran in to a lot of generational differences in how words are used. My mom, born in the early 1920's, always said, "I need to go out" when she wanted to use the rest room (I finally figured out that was a reference to using the outdoor toilet when she was a kid). She also called the fridge an ice box, when those had been gone for a quarter century when I came along. I learned I'm now part of that gap when I told one of my grandkids to "roll down the window" and they just gave me a confused look (He'd never seen a car as old as mine with a crank instead of a button to adjust the windows).

I could go on but won't. In closing let me say:" You's be careful and don't tump over on the hard road." That's southern Illinois-ese for "Be careful and don't wreck on the highway."