Music Banter - American Dialect Map

Quote:

Originally Posted by ribbons (Post 1399750)

My mom and Southern relatives use that expression. It's supposed to mean the devil is angry and beats his wife because God created a sunny, beautiful day -- and the wife's "tears" fall as rain.

Here's my map. I've lived in NYC all my life, yet still can't say I'm really familiar with Yonkers and Newark/Paterson dialects.

http://nyti.ms/1jUOp1J

I had never heard that Southern phrase about a devil beating his wife = sunshower. The South seems very religious, so I shouldn't be surprised, but I still am.

The test was interesting because I had no idea that people in the U.S. have other pronunciations for "crayon" besides "cray-awn," and I thought everyone said "Mary, merry, and marry" the same way. I also didn't know some people have a special name for the night before Halloween. Huh!

My personal dialect map was almost the exact opposite of yours, ribbons, and also very accurate: my dialect was most similar to that of people from Minneapolis, Grand Rapids, and Des Moines.

I took the test a second time, and discovered that some of the questions were different, which shifted the localization of my dialect. The second test said my dialect matches Wichita, Omaha, and Des Moines.

The *third* time I took the test, I got Minneapolis, Madison, and Milwaukee.

I learned that I am familiar with and use quite a few words for the same thing, such as pill bug, sow bug, & roly poly. I was surprised how many other words people use for that cute critter. People who call a pill bug a centipede or millipede are just wrong, though. That shouldn't be called a dialect; that should just be called "wrong."