December 24, 2013 By: Juanita Jean Herownself Category: Uncategorized
My son showed me this in the New York Times and I thought you might enjoy playing. You answer a few questions and it tells you the three most likely cities where you were born.
It nailed me with Houston (where I was born), New Orleans (where my Daddy was born) and Little Rock (where my Momma’s father was born and raised). It nailed my son and his wife both.
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My name is Susan DuQuesnay Bankston. I live in Richmond, Texas, in the heart of Tom DeLay's old district. It's nuttier than squirrel poop here.
I am honored and privileged to know Miss Juanita Jean Herownself, hairdresser extraordinary and political maven. Since she does not have time to fiddle with this internet stuff, I type her website for her and you can read it if you want to. If you don't, she truly does not give a big bear's butt.
A lot of what I post here has to do with local politics, but you probably have the same folks in your local government.
This ain't a blog. Blogs are way too trendy for me. This is a professional political organization.
Totally missed me. It guessed 3 cities right around Oakland and I was born and raised in the New York City area.
Maybe learning to catch crawdads in the creek in Oregon had something to do with it. I’d never heard of the critters before I saw them there in the creek.
Aw shucks.
1I’m from a town in nawthwest Jawjuh too small to be listed, but I’m right in the center of the red area. It nailed me.
2Oh, Teh Gerg, you sound just like my muthah in law. One day not long after I’d married her son, she called me, said, “It’s youah muthah!” “Who?” I puzzled. “Youah MUTHAH!!!” I thought “She’s not MY mother…..”
3Jan, maybe you watch TV in Houston. Lots of folks from Houston do not sound like the rest of Tayuksuns. Speaking of which, this reminds me of our youngest. He was in second grade in a small west Texas town. One day he came home and said, “Mama, how many syllables are in bayud? Two or three? Let’s see,….bayud….ba-a-ay-uddd…” I said “There’s one syllable in bed: BED.” He said earnestly, “No, no, there’s at least two…bayud….” and he wandered off muttering to himself.
4I knew I’d be nailed to Philly as soon as I identified a long sandwich as a hoagie. Here in the DC area they’re called subs but they’re not the same thing at all.
Accents do change. My husband and his brother moved to the DC area and sound completely different from their sister who stayed in Roanoke VA.
My friend moved from Maryland to Maine when their son was about six. After his first day at school there soon afterward, she asked him if he liked it. He thought for a moment and said, “Ayup.”
5The cheerleaders at the high school where I taught were incapable of saying “Go! Fight! Win!” without using four syllables. Several of them couldn’t even understand the issue, and some of them though I was mocking them. (Well, maybe a little . . . )
6While showing the deep south in solid red for me, it claimed New Yawk, Yonkers, and Jersey City, I was actually born in New Mexico, Mom was born and raised in Arkansas (as was my father), and I grew up mostly in Colorado.
Go figure.
7Native Houstonian but it placed me in Shreveport (well, I have visited relatives there once or twice), Jackson MS, and Birmingham Alabama. The last two I’ve never been near. What a hoot! But it was a pretty entertaining quiz.
8I did it twice, switching the marginal answers. It was wrong on both shots. I’ve been told in the past that I can’t possibly be from Pittsburgh, but no one has ever told me I’m from the New York metro area.
9Well, it got where I grew up right (New Orleans). But that’s a function more of what you hear constantly from others in that area of the country (neutral ground, poor boys…)
Odd thing is that I didn’t really pick up the New Orleans accent. Since I’ve been around the country often enough, living in various places, my accent is more as something a foreigner would use than a native.
10Houston most similar with Shreveport and Baton Rouge added in.
11I have lived my 76 years in two Texas counties. It put me in Mississippi and Alabama.
12It sure missed Denison or wherever they would considered a city in north Texas or Oklahoma. First time it said
Shreveport, Baton Rouge and Jackson. (I did live two years in Greenville Miss. Still tend to drop a syllable from Mississippi and that was many years ago. Other than that lived only in north Texas and Oklahoma.)
Tried again changing a few answers that I’d debated about the first time through. and it said Louisville, Greensboro and Winston Salem. Don’t remember ever having been in any of those three.
At least it was interesting to see the maps for the different individual answers and wonder about some of the words I’d never heard of.
13Spot on for me. Of course we drink out of bubblers, which kinda nails it in a flash.
I do have a cousin nearby who insists on using youse (spells it you’se for some reason). Have no idea where she picked that up as she grew up right next to us and never lived more than 50 miles from there.
14Interesting.
15It pointed me to Providence RI, Boston and NYC.
I’m Australian, living in the land down under!
It just goes to show that we are not totally divided by our common language.
I was pegged as a Californian although I have never visited anywhere north of Napa. it had me from Modesto or Sacramento, oddly because I have never heard of a drive-through liquor store. There is only one drive-through dairy in all of San Diego County. Drive through food is an anachronism to me. I think using too much surf terminology would probably have made the quiz too region-specific. Suffice it to say, it didn’t pinpoint me too well. Beddies. Reefer. Ganja. Thai stick. Herb. Gremmies. Nice ride. I was trippin’ out man! Yeah man! I hosed her! It was pretty dyno! Don’t bogart that joint. I was jonesin’. You’re trippin’! Pretty much. For sure bros. Like totally. Full-on!
16It pinned me to Birmingham where I was born 70 years ago. I’ve lived in Texas for the past 67 years, but evidently, none of my indicators pointed to Texas.
17I love these things, I confuse the daylights out of them. I’m a bit of an odd fish, Mom from Michigan, Father from Arkansas, lived as a child mostly in Germany with a bit of time before and after in Arizona. And now I’ve lived 20 years in North Carolina. So it gave me Modesto, Cali. Rochester, N.Y. and Milwaukee. Go figure.
18I’ve lived all my 64 years along the Texas Gulf Coast between Houston and Baytown, 30 miles east. This little exercise pegged me to Lubbock, Amarillo, and Fort Worth. At least the results kept me inside of Texas, huh!?
Of course, I studied phonetics in college, and by doing so, I definitely learned to drop some of my Gulf Coast accents and avoid the Dallas area accents and some of my Central North Texas family accents. I THOUGHT I cleaned up my speech pretty well, but maybe not?
Why, heck, I was still in elementary school when I read about “barbed wire” fences one day and thought how similar in use and design my family’s take on “bob war” fences was to the other type of fence.
I’ll never forget:
One day outside on his driveway, my uncle warned me about the mean, rascally cat behind the tar. After looking around a few seconds for a 5-gallon tub of black gooey tar, I finally realized I was standing next to his car, so the cat was probably lurking behind the nearest tire.
All things considered, I think my dialect is pretty darn good at this point in my life.
19My “red zone” now extends from south Texas to New York City and they couldn’t find a city to list as most likely, let alone three.
HA! Gotcha, I think back at them. One thing this test does not figure out is that experience changes language–an old woman who has lived more than once place and encountered people from somewhere else won’t use the same words she used at 16 when she’d lived in the same house since age two.
Born in Edinburg, lived entire childhood in McAllen…but influenced by people there who had not been born there (or anywhere in Texas.) We had a lot of “northerners” plus immigrants from Europe as well as Mexico. It depended on who your parents were friends with whether you heard a Texas accent (any of the five main Texas accents or a variation thereof.) The people I heard most often were from New York City, Europe, eastern Oklahoma, the Valley, other parts of Texas, British West Indies, Lebanon by way of Mexico (the most multilingual of all.)
20Nailed me dead-on. I’ve lived most of my life (with the exception of 13 years in Ohio) here in Greensboro (Ok, I’ll fess up, 45 years here in the Gate City) and it put me right between Winston-Salem and Durham.
But no one around me thinks I sound like a North Carolinian. They all peg me for Ohio. Go figure.
21Not only spot on for area where I grew up (costal southern CA) but nailed the town where I finished school. It hit my Green Mountain Boy husband squarely, though he has lived longer in other places than his native VT.
22I’ve taken this test twice and both times it said I was from one of three cities in Arizona. I was actually born and grew up in Michigan. But I have lived most of my life in the South, so that must have something to do with it..
23Nope. It does hit one city, New Orleans, where I lived for a couple of years (15 years in the southwest part of the state), but I was born and raised in KY. Never lived near Shreveport or any part of Mississippi. I guess the quiz doesn’t take into account too much mobility.
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