These Eight Maps Prove That Everyone in the U.S. Speaks Funny But You
Quick, what do you call a sweetened carbonated beverage? Really? You call it... that? Wow. Well, you're wrong. Unless you said soda.
Business Insider flags this great set of maps from linguistics Ph.D. student Joshua Katz that show the way regional dialects and usages are distributed:
The composite map gives a picture of the overall distribution, coloring each cell according to whichever answer is estimated to be most likely at that location. The more clearly one answer dominates, the darker the color. Individual maps show estimated probability of each particular answer at a given location, with larger probabilities shown in red and smaller probabilities shown in blue. At the moment, only the four most popular answers for each survey question are displayed.
There's the obvious—like the soda vs. pop above, or y'all versus you guys (versus you versus you all):
Some stuff was new, though. I'm from New Jersey, and I never realized that everyone else in the country was wrong about Mischief Night:
I did know about the Mary/merry/marry issue.
And the hoagie situation:
My girlfriend is from Rhode Island, so I knew about "bubblers"—but not that people from Wisconsin said it too:
Here's the hotly contested "crayon":
And "caramel," which we still allow—in the 21st century!—to be pronounced "carmel."