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| These are called JoJo's, I don't care what you say. |
The other day I came across this old internet meme: The Dialect Quiz. This sort of thing has always fascinated me. For example, as a kid in the Portland area we called flip-flops "thongs" (much to the amusement of, well, everyone's college roommate). In Hawai'i, they're called "slippaz" and here in the OC they're referred to as flip-flops.
An OC-ism (so far as I can tell) is referring to the grocery store (Albertson's, for example) as "the market." As in, "I ran into your co-worker at the market, she was buying arsenic. Thought you might want to know."
Well, I digress. Here's the official quiz:
- What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
- What is the bug that when you touch it, it curls into a ball?
- What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?
- What do you call gym shoes?
- What do you say to address a group of people?
- What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?
- What do you call your grandparents?
- What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
- What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?
- What is the thing you change the TV channel with?
I would answer thusly:
1. TP-ing a house
2. potato bug*
3. soda (but I used to call it "pop")
4. gym shoes
5. Yo!
6. Daddy Long Legs
7. Grandma and either Papa or Grandpa
8. Shopping cart
9. summer?
10. remote
* I recently had a disagreement with my significant other on this one. In the end I went to the great answerer in the cloud and Googled it. As it turns out, a potato bug is actually this HIDEOUS cricket thing with a giant head. That said, Wikipedia notes that a "roly poly bug" is also referred to as a potato bug, so it's not just me.
Hope you'll share your answers below! I'm especially interested what the alternate answers might be for questions one and six. I have to admit I'm confused by question nine.
