Just for you, Bob, captured forever.LOL!

 

well we all gotta start somewhere right?

 

Going onto my upper Midwest dialect. I find it fun when I hear someone with a different accent. If I get to know the person well enough I ask what they think about how I pronounce words and our word usage. One co-worker from West Viginia said on of the strange terms we use is "Shoot the garbage in the can." He asked if we planned to throw a piece of trash in a can and then take a gun and shoot at. Like Ross said, we tend to use double negatives. My in-laws are farmer from a German background. I lived 15 miles from the area I live in now so we we're separated by much distance, we live in the area where my wife's family settle in the 1800s. All of the old German farm families are related in one way or another. It's funny listening to her family at family gatherings because the intersperse German words and German grammar into the English languish. They end all of their questions with "not". "You're going outside, not?". My favorite is when my my mother-in-law wants someone to turn a light off, "Make the light out." My wife gets a little hung up on terms I use that are fairly commom in Milwaukee, the city I was raised in. Most of the phrases or words I use she singles out as strange but are commonly used on the nightly news. On the other hand she doesn't think any of the strange phrases and words her family uses are strange at all.

 

Well I feel like I'm in good company here... I grew up with delia... I will die with it but have learned to live with it and if someone doesn't like it well screw them... If someone doesn't like the way I spell word something.... It's their problem because their not going to bother me.... they can just skip my post if they don't like it... So don't let anyone effect you when your posting, I want to hear what you have to say...

 

I'm with you Bob.
I can type and write pretty good and I always try to take the time to reread what I've written before I submit, but it never fails, you don't see the mistakes until after its posted. No problem, its just the way things are. We're all human here, we all make mistakes.

You mentioned the German dialect intermixed with the English, out here we have the Mexican influence that gives us some interesting phrases. For instance; you might need to "put attention" to something, or "get down from the truck" or maybe "close the lights"

Its all good
Bobby

 

Fun thread! I enjoy reading almost all posts as a game sometimes to understand what is being said....sorta like reading vanity license plates.

Yeah, I can't believe some of the things I've screwed up - usually long after I can edit them. I need to communicate effectively on a daily basis but the internet has caused me to develop habits I never learned in school - things you guys probably recognize as my stupid style, like -'s between thoughts or.......to separate ideas

I first became aware of regional differences in 4th grade when my family moved from Youngstown, OH to Powell, OH. First day in class a cute girl came up to me and said, "Y'all tawk funny, y'all sound like mah cuzzins from New Yawk"

Ditto on the german or PA dutch in PA, OH and IN that leads to things like, "Are you going to the store with?" or "Thats a great looking truck, not?"

Say what?? Gotta love it!

 

our quirks and faults are what makes all of us here so dain interesting . !!!!!!!!!!! who cares what others might !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OOOOOOOOOPPPPPS , might think .........................

 

Don't be dissing the geese - especially the Canada kind - nothing worse than a cranky Canadian! :runsandhidesfromourkanukposters:

DW

 

...and how about yolks for yokes! That one always makes me laugh.

They just don't teach grammar and spelling in schools like they used to but as long as we can get our point across I don't think spelling is that much of a problem...

 

No ,i realize they don't teach grammar and spelling any more,to bad. They did when i was in school,what little i went. I do remember the spelling was kept correct ,but the grammar was not. I moved around a lot and was in many different schools. The grammar was taught the way it was used in that part of the USA.I guess it's the text short cuts that bother me. It's a group of kids sitting around together and never speaking other than through texting. That make me wonder if in the far away future if humans will forget how to converse any other way. Oh well ,that's their problem, let's build trucks.

 

Never too worried bout spelling and grammar... it's usually how difficult or inept I am in describing the problem or stating the question... upon re-reading it, it seems either too vauge or too long like the book War and Peace.




Cheers... Brian

 

Not me, I'm perfect! (just ask my wife)

 

One I always found cute... Gonna let the windows up in the car

 

I have a customer who is from Germany, he came over about ten years ago, and goes back every year for about three weeks. He told me even although he subscribes to German papers on-line to keep up what is going on back home when he goes home it takes a little while for him to update his German. It's not that he forgets how to speak the language but there are so many words that are introduced while he's gone. General conversation with a relative can hit a snag when a new word is used in the conversation. I also wonder how texting is going to affect our language and way of communicating. If you don't use it you lose it.

My two sons just graduated high school in the last three years. While attending school my wife and I would help with their homework. It was always an uphill battle because their penmanship and grammar was horrible. We'd try like heck to get them to write legible with good penmanship and proper language structure and all we'd get was, "The teacher doesn't care about how well we write as long as we get the idea." Today I can hardly understand anything they write. My oldest has the worst handwriting and my youngest can't put a paragraph together. We tried out best to impress upon them that communication is the most important thing that people judge you by but it's really hard when you have a school full of teachers and administrators being lax for eight hours a day.

Another thing was math. They were allowed from the earliest grade to use calculators. They were never taught basic math after the first few grades. Right now I can look at a column of numbers and calculate the answer in my head. My sons need to break out the calculator. Sure, they'll get the exact correct answer but I'll have the correct, or a pretty close, answer in 1/3 the time. If they don't have access to a calculator they struggle for an answer.

 

Exactly! We recently had a scheduled meeting with our 3rd grader's teacher to go over some test scores, progress, etc. I brought up the same exact concern to the teacher about my daughter's total lack of penmanship and neatness. In a very polite and indirect way, the teacher told me exactly what you said above and offered no real promise to make her work on it. She even said something like "Well....now that we're all using computers anyway......." Remember 3-lined paper that OUR teachers used to teach us how to write our letters? Gone. It's a thing of the past. It drives me up the wall.