Where I'm From was: the curious grammar of Ohio.

[Dan Goodman]

Date:    Fri, 29 Oct 2004 09:57:29 -0400
From:    Page Stephens <hpst at EARTHLINK.NET>
Subject: Re: the curious grammar of Ohio

Hey youse guys.

Try to find that in southern Ohio though it is common enough in
Cleveland and Buffalo, N.Y.

The problem is the misidentification of a geographical/political area
with cultural formations especially since such formations have a name
which people know with no idea of the difference in the dialects and
socio/cultural existents within them.

All too many years ago I wrote an article based on research outside the
US in which I described my experience in trying to tell people where I
was from.

Centralia, Illinois never worked because none of my inquisitors knew
Centralia and damned few of them had ever heard of Illinois.

I did discover that most of them had heard of Chicago so I ended up
telling them that I was born some 250 miles south of Chicago and that
Chicago was in Illinois which was located in the middle of the US.

I argued in my article that this was sort of a general rule which
applies not only abroad but also in the US since most people have only
the vaguest idea of geography until you give them some frame of
reference and that as a result you have to give them some reference
which they are able to recognize. In my own case in spite of the fact
that Centralia is closer to Mississippi than it is to Chicago and much
more culturally and dialectally related to Mississippi than it is to
Chicago, Chicago works while Mississippi does not.

To _parts_ of Mississippi, I would think.  I used to have a job in which
I sometimes took calls from Starkville, Mississippi and Carbondale,
Illinois.  The people in Carbondale were the ones who sounded Southern
to be.  (I suspect a trained listener would have found some Southern
features in the Starkville speech.)

On explaining where you're from:  I'm from a rural part of the Catskills
region.  I've had people be absolutely certain I told them I was from
New York City; and others who remembered that I was from somewhere
around Buffalo.  But I've sometimes encountered people who've said
things like "My family has a graveyard in Kingston."

--
Dan Goodman
Journal http://www.livejournal.com/users/dsgood/
Predictions http://seeingfutures.blogspot.com
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.