If You Like Piña Coladas, And Gettin' Caught in ...
Speaking of what you call it when it rains while the sun's still shining, doesn't it make your day to know that some folks refer to this phenomenon as pineapple rain? Made my day, anyway. Elsewhere in the U.S., people say the wolf is giving birth or the devil is beating his wife. To see where these expressions are used, check out the map from this uber-cool Dialect Survey. (And hey, my apologies if you now have that piña colada song stuck in your head. I find that the best way to get rid of an earworm like that is to stop what I'm doing, and just sing it at the top of my lungs. You might try it.)
posted by Martha at 7:30 PM
10 Comments:
That dialect survey is über-cool indeed, thanks for the link! This ex-Kansan has confirmed why she now says "soda" instead of "pop"; 15 years of living on the coasts instead of the Midwest will do it to you.
Yeah, language lover, growing up in Kentucky, I called EVERYTHING a coke. I'd tell the waitress I'd like a coke, and she'd ask, "What kind?"
I'd say, "Orange Crush" or "Nehi Grape" or "Big Red."
And nobody thought that was weird!
And yeah, that dialect survey is lots of fun. We should look into getting Dr. Vaux on our sometime. Allan Metcalf's book "How We Talk" is another great look at regionalisms.
wait, sunbelt -- do you mean you'd call it "mid-morning" even if it happened in the middle of the afternoon?
And yay for rainbows!
Wow, you called everything "coke" in Kentucky? I thought only Texans did that. And I didn't even believe it until I met a Texan and heard it for myself. I sure thought it was weird!
Heh, heh. Yeah, well, now that I look back on it, I think it's weird that I ever drank Big Red, but that's another story.
Having grown up in both Mexico and California, I noticed people refer to their soft drinks differently. In CA we use soda (even among Spanish speakers, it's still a soda). But in Mexcio, people call them refrescos, coming from the word refrescar, which means to refresh.
The funny thing is that if you go to Mexico and ask for a "soda" they know you're either from or have lived in the US.
It's a little-known fact that dipsomanaical is an anagram of
piñacoladaism (if you ignore the tilde).
Correction: That should've read
"dipsomaniacal".
Daz, I'm speechless!
Hey, Antonio, thanks for the info re "soda." I didn't realize it'd be a shibboleth in Mexico.
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