Question by Jes!: What are different words for the same items?
I’m from Central Pennsylvania, and I recently found out that apparently I have an accent, and that we call items different things from other places. Just wondering what you call things?
Like here we call “running shoes” sneakers. Other places call them tennis shoes.
Best answer:
Answer by epic
i think what you mean is a synonym which in web definition means
“A word, phrase, or term that has a meaning the same as, or very near to, that of another word, phrase or term.” from www.photometadata.org/node/53
Answer by LadyLynn
I was telling my English friend about eating “stuffing” at Thanksgiving. They call it “Bread Sauce!!!.” lol
When we give instructions, at the end we might say, “and there you go!” or “Voila!” The English have this expression: “Bob’s your uncle!” LOL
I’ll try to think of more and I’ll add them.
Answer by Mark W
One of the most common examples is how people from different parts of the country refer to soft drinks. Where I grew up, we used the term “pop” in reference to a cola. When I moved to Chicago, I’ve heard people use the term “soda” for a cola. There are probably better examples, but this is the one that comes to my mind first.
Answer by JILL
In response to Ladylynn…I’m British and we have hundreds of silly expressions like “Bob’s your uncle” and there are so many regional versions…
we are cooking on gas = we are doing well in a particular task
trainers = running shoes/tennis shoes/sneakers
she has a bun in th’oven or she is up the duff = she is pregnant
cor blimey = wow
have a look at the wikipedia link, you will probably be laughing at the rubbish we say!!!
Answer by bfalls
We all have an accent, for people who come from a different part of the English-speaking world than we do. That doesn’t make any of us wrong, unless we want to be TV and radio broadcasters; then (in the U.S.) we’re supposed to adopt a particular type of Midwestern accent.
I learned in my graduate-school linguistics class that the oldest accents in U.S. English come from the different regions of the British Isles from which people settled different parts of the East Coast. so New England, New York City, the mid-Atlantic, and the Southeast have their distinctive accents including pronunciation, vocabulary, and even some bits of syntax. There are five major accent groups in U.S. English, and if you map them they stretch westward across the country in uneven swaths. The mid-Atlantic one morphs into Midwestern English that is a wider and wider band until it dominates almost the entire north-south width of the U.S. through Washington, Oregon, and California.
More modern variations are local usages that grew up before the mass media and cheap, fast travel started to pull the U.S. back together, linguistically speaking. There are lots of local word variations like the one you list:
soda, pop, soda pop, tonic, coke (even when it isn’t Coke)
jeans, dungarees, levis (even when they aren’t Levi’s)
sub, hero, grinder, hoagie
…and so on.
Alas, our mobility and national broadcast media may threaten this linguistic diversity with extinction over the long run. We’re now all exposed to “standard” American English on TV and radio, when we go to college, and when we move to a new region. We may speak one of the many local accents, including several I used to hear around Philadelphia and New York and in New England, and many local flavors of Black American English, but how many of our children still be speaking that way when they are our age?
What do you think? Answer below!


0 comments:
Post a Comment