Regional variation in words

oh gosh, now that i remember this thread exists-

i work scooping ice cream and handing out donuts, and it took me a week to get used to folks asking for a dip of ice cream

'yeah, i'll take a dip'

'a what'

'a dip, of pralines and cream'

'oh, a scoop?'

'a dip'

'gotcha'

made it harder when some folks mumbled their orders, so i wasn't even sure they were saying dip and poor me was like 'a dipped what?'

 

Today I learned that the UK "grill" is roughly equivalent to US "broil" and that US "grill" is "barbecue" in the UK. (I'm not sure if this is the same for the whole US, but I'm from the South where barbecue refers to a specific method of slow cooking meat or the sauce used on it.) Thanks @TwoBrokenMirrors!

 

My grandma used to live in a town in Arizona where the population was like 50% snowbirds. The demographics got twice as white in the winter and it turned into a ghost town in the summer.

 

@bornofthesea670 Have you ever had to deal with the sprinkles vs jimmies conundrum?

 

The second bit isn't just a UK thing, I've heard way too many people up north use "barbecue" when they mean "grill outdoors" rather than the specific food. (...is it a Virginia-only thing to refer to "pulled pork and/or slow-cooked ribs with The Sauce" as "barbecue" and everything else by body part?)

 

I saw a buzzfeed video that pointed out not everyone calls shopping carts buggies? And that kind of mystifies me.

 

They're shopping trollies over here.

 

Although note that 'getting trollied' does not usually literally mean being run over by a shopping cart XD (It means getting really, really drunk. Sidenote, you can verb almost any noun to mean getting absolutely shitfaced in the UK. Hammered, bouldered, tabled...)

 

A shopping cart is just a shopping cart, it's a cart you put the shopping in, what're all these fancy words? :P (By which I mean I have vaguely heard of trolley/buggy/etc for the thing only as "a thing Those People Over There" use!)

 

It's called a caddie in French for some reason.

 

I'm not a reliable source due to my mixture of social isolation and excessive consumption of Terry Pratchett books, but I think we at least have "hammered" on this side of the pond too. Haven't heard the other two.

 

Nope, if you mean anything other than pulled pork or ribs here in SC, it's "barbecue (x)" (normally various chicken parts or beef ribs). Just "barbecue" is what you said, although since SC is at the crux of three barbecue regions, what actually is barbecue sauce is hotly debated. :P

Yeah, I got used to that early because I live in a town that's got both a big army base and several colleges, but it still trips me up from time to time.

While I wouldn't have said the thing, I pretty much immediately got the point. XP I have heard hammered here before, but not the other two. I have heard cargoed, bombed, wasted, tanked, etc.

 

Ahh yes, getting drunk. The universal human experience XDD

 

Plastered, sauced...
I sometimes use constructions like "my hands need washed," which I picked up from my grandparents. I think it has a distinctly rural/old-fashioned flavor. (If it's understandable and gives me greater economy of language, I'll start saying it. This is how I, a white Iowan, gained "aight" and "y'all")
I've heard my great-grandmother (turned 100 this year, long-time resident of Pella, Iowa) say "he likes it so well" to mean "he likes it so much."
Have any of you heard someone call gym shoes tennies? My mom used to call my shoes that when I was little. It was usually "your tennies," as in "let's get your tennies on."

 

Very very rarely I've heard them called "tennis shoes," usually by 70-ish-yo grandmother. They're normally "sneakers" in my area.

 

Oh, absolutely. They're pretty much all tennis shoes here, and I've def heard people call them tennies, but normally to small kids, ye.

 

That one's actually common in a big swath of the US from parts of the Midwest through Pennsylvania, and really endemic in Pittsburgh. I know this because I looked it up after I used it and somebody went "YOU CAN TELL THIS PERSON IS FROM PITTSBURGH BECAUSE THEY SAID THAT" and I was like, "...No, I'm... not? o_o"

 

In eastern ontario theyre running shoes, sneakers, and my friend's mom is from Newfoundland and has been known to call them runners

 

Godddd, I just remembered the "wasp vs wasper" revelation I had. I honestly thought that the full word for a wasp was "wasper", because thats what folks around here call them and what I grew up knowing them as. So I'd hear the word "wasp", and was like 'huh, okay, that must be the shortened version!'. I was 16 before I found out that wasper isn't a real word and my whole world collapsed.

 

Is it pronounced "warsper," or is that exclusively a southern WV thing?