February 21, 2004

What do you call ...? I like this dialect survey (recommended by Andrew Sullivan).

"What do you call the area of grass between the sidewalk and the road?" Lots of names for that, I see now, but where I come from it was called the "extension," which is apparently an even more minor term than "terrace," which they call it here in Madison.

It's too late to participate in the survey, but you can get an assessment of your regional tendency by taking a quiz here. I came out 43% Yankee on the quiz, which is probably a pretty accurate way to describe someone who started in northern Delaware (Newark and Wilmington)(and had a Delaware father), spent her teens in northern New Jersey (Wayne), lived 5 years in Michigan (and had a Michigan mother), 10 years in New York City, and, having reached the age of dialect impermeability, 20 years in Wisconsin.

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