Max's Musings

Odd Things

Odd Things

Here's an odd thing. Just now, checking my Facebook page, I saw an entry with an enticing title that lured me into clicking on it. I'm sure you've done the same thing. You click, and your browser opens a page so clogged with ads that it takes forever (well, two or three seconds) to load. Now it's both enticing and annoying. Next, what lured you into click Hell isn't on the page. At least, not yet. You have to load a dozen or more glacial pages to find out which cast members of Star Trek hated each other (like we didn't already know), or what Amy and Sheldon were not going to do on Big Bang Theory next season (like that could possibly be a surprise).

Anyway, this morning's foray into advertising quicksand was called "Fifteen odd things about America that Americans don't realize." The odd thing was, I realized all of them, but I plowed through the list anyway. Why I would be so stupid might be an interesting blog topic, but the banality of stupidity seems, well, boring.

Anyway, the other odd thing about the list of odd things was that it spoke of America and Americans as though we are one people with one language. Anyone who has lived in more than one region knows this isn't true.

Consider, for example, the "pop-soda" debate. My first time in a Texas restaurant, the waitress asked me what kind of "Coke" I wanted to go with my meal. Thinking of the Saturday Night Live skit, and being a something of a smart a**, I said, "No Coke. Pepsi."

To my amazement, she nodded and wrote it down. I had no idea that in this part of the US, "Coke" meant what I was used to calling "pop," and what other parts of the country called "soda." See this map   for where "Coke" means "pop."

There are other linguistic peculiarities. At the grocery store, do you put your purchases in a sack or a bag? Those big ruts in the street: are they potholes or chuckholes? Is a "tablet" something you write on or an aspirin? In Oklahoma, "tires" is pronounced "tars," and "relaters" sell houses. See here   for 122 regional dialect variations in US English.

As authors, we need to be aware of these differences, both for authenticity and to avoid baffling our readers. We can't know what we don't know--where have I heard that before? Our prose could be indecipherable if our private eye asks for a tablet and her assistant hands her a notebook while the readers are expecting a hangover cure.

In fact, there is good reason to believe that the US really consists of eleven distinct and quite different cultural groups--eleven nations if you will. This article   gives the historical reasons for this, and describes the general characteristics of each "nation."

But that's another whole blog.