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^as I understand it, the term hoosier (for urban white trash) in St. Louis originated from early settlers from indiana who settled here during the civil war and brought with them their lack of sophistication. that was the end of its connection to indiana, as far as st. louisis concerned. being a transplant to st. louis, i do not see this term being replaced with another one. it is very st. louis, and seems to be used ubiquitously across generations. my next door neighbor's 11-year-old son yelled "hoosier" out the window to a car racing loudly by. it's not dying out.
I have noticed it isn't dying out in some areas but the outer suburbs/exurbs it seems that way. It will die out due to transplants in my opinion. I heard other stories that the term was tied to when the Chrysler plant opened when many of the origional workers were people from Indiana who bought homes in South County. It also ties the Indiana connection as well as the fact that South County is where the term is associated with the strongest.
In Iowa we called shopping bags "sacks". I had a few instances in Chicago where I kept asking for a sack, and the woman behind the register just stared at me in complete confusion.
Interesting. Yep, I would guess then it may have a German influence. It always drives me up the wall (even though I love my WI) because usually in WI, the accent tends to heavily STRESS vowels and syllables....for example, the town of "Waukesha" (which most would pronounce "Wa-ki-shaw") in Wisconsin is heavily pronounced "WAH-KEE-SHAW"). Yet, creek where you'd expect us Wisconsinites to really stress the "EEK" they change it to "crick"...just weird.
I also notice in Wisconsin...especially many kids...pronounce "Milk" as "Melk"....
That Waukeesha thing is a southern Wisconsin thing, only.
One I hear a lot in MN is "come with", as in "Do ya wanna come with?", instead of "Do ya wanna come with me?" People in Milwaukee use the expression "Eh?" a lot, very similar to Canadians. Here in MN, parking garages are called "ramps", and the grassy area between the sidewalk and the cub is called "the boulevard". Also in MN, the word aunt is pronounced "awnt". Listen to Garrison Keillor say it sometime. Everyplace else I've lived, that pronunciation was considered affected: "I simply MUST go visit my awnt in the Hamptons today, right after my polo match!". On cold days, a college friend from North Dakota used to say: It's colder'n a brass john in the Yukon!"
That 'come with'. structure is from the German, as is the 'En so?' of the Lake Michigan Counties from about Manitowoc on north.
Once you get nearer to the UP border, you lose the word 'to', and definite articles like 'the'. (For example, 'Do you want to go to the store? becomes 'Do you want go store?')
Sounds pretty weird- I thought it was just a strange regionalism first time I heard it- but it comes from the fact that there is no 'to' or 'the' in the Finnish language, and Finns are a force around here.
Hehe... this is sort of a.. difficult.. thread, since there are tons of dialects *within* the 'Midwest' (as it's usually defined - and it certainly has plenty of definitions). I mean, we've got some of the most Northern of the Northern dialects (whose speakers could easily be [wrongly, obviously] thought Canadian), along with people whom the average American would guess were from Tennessee (natives of most of rural MO, a smidge of SE KS, and southern IL/IN/OH). So, yes, generalizing will be problematic. But examples from specific regions are ok.
But here's one you'll hear in the Northern Midwest, including the Chicago area:
"Can I go with?"/"Are you coming with?", etc. - basically, the 'you' is omitted at the end of the phrase. Apparently (and not surprisingly) it's a German loan... e.g., "Gehst du mit?" ("Are you going with?") [Edit: Ah, Geechie beat me to this one. Oh well. ]
Also, when you're in a temporary state of surprise due to misunderstanding/misinterpreting what someone says, and then said person clears up the misunderstanding, you might say, "I was going to say!" [possibly preceded by "Ah, I get it," or something of the sort] I had no idea this particular expression was regional until a friend of mine from Las Vegas (but whose family was originally from Boston, MA) was confused when I used it... then again, she might've just been weird. I'll have to ask my born-in-Seattle, San-Antonio-raised BF if he's familiar with it when I see him this evening. Oh, and you'll find this feature as far south as MO, whose natives (outside of most of StL and KC) generally fit into the 'Southern' camp, linguistically.
But, yeah, I can see lexical (regional vocabulary) being the emphasis of this thread, since grammatical/syntactic variation (including weird idioms) is pretty limited across the US.. unless you start talking about Spanglish, select varieties of Southern American English (including AAVE), etc.
As for the 'bag'/'sack' thing, though, I *always* used 'bag,' as did my family.. we're from northern IL and the Quad Cities of IA. ('Sack' had a narrower usage... I usually thought of a burlap sort of thing when I thought of that word.. the sort of thing you'd store potatoes in or use in a gunny sack race on track and field day at school. ) 'Bag' was also used in Omaha, NE; Chicago; and Madison, WI. Missouri, on the other hand, is 'sack' country... I always assumed it was because of the sort of Upper/Mountain South influence, since it's also 'sack' in Arkansas. For those Iowans who use 'sack,' what part of the state do you live in?
Last edited by Alicia Bradley; 11-02-2010 at 12:09 PM..
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Oh, and you'll find this feature as far south as MO, whose natives (outside of most of StL and KC) generally fit into the 'Southern' camp, linguistically.
