My results from the dialect map

When I moved from Manhattan to Boston, I no longer took my clothes to the dry cleaners.  In Boston, they were “cleansers.”  I couldn’t order a milk shake;  they were “frappes,” (and way too watery).  And when it came to using the word “very,” fuhgeddaboudit! Here in Boston, it’s “wicked,” as in “wicked good” or “wicked pissa.”

To people overseas, America might at times seem like one big, homogeneous country with one culture, language, and dialect (or maybe two languages, English and Spanish, or the combination, Spanglish), but that’s far from true.

People around the US all eat take-out sandwiches, but depending on where they live, they order subs, grinders, hoagies, heroes, po’ boys, bombers, Italian sandwiches, baguettes, or sarneys.

When Americans drive around traffic islands, they call them variously roundabouts, rotaries, circles, traffic circles, or traffic circuses.

And, although I knew about “package stores” where you can get cheap, untaxed booze, I’d never heard of drive-through liquor stores, called “brew thrus,” “party barns,” “bootleggers,” “beer barns,” or “beverage barns.”