Hello, I Talk Funny

I'm a Northerner. A Yankee. A transplant. A carpetbagger. I was born in Buffalo, NY but have been living in Georgia for nearly five years now. Some of it was spent in Athens, where I attended college, and some has been spent in Savannah, where my parents live. Whenever I mention this move to people, the first thing out of their mouth will invariably pertain to culture shock. As if the differences weren't glaringly obvious in my everyday life, I am repeatedly forced to recount in detail the things that are different about my life now that I reside south of the Mason-Dixon line.

What could possibly be so different that I am actually inspired to write about it? We're in the same country, could the culture possibly be that shocking? Of course. The most obvious difference is speech. Nothing makes you more of an outsider than the way you talk. It isn't just the southern drawl versus my northeastern diction and Midwestern flat A's. There are also individual words that are different, some that were easy to understand, others that took a long time and plenty of repetition to figure out.

Based on the nature of life, the first difference I heard was the referral of a car's license plate as the "tag." I guess that makes sense if you think about it. A government-issued piece of metal with a code on it identifying you to law enforcement is a method of tagging an individual similar to how a seagull is tagged for its migratory pattern. If you're trying to get away you can be identified by your tag.

What surprised me about this difference was actually not in the license plate itself, but the name of the building where you go to get you plates. The tag office. It sounds like slang, like referring to Animal Control as "the pound" or McDonald's as "Mickey-D's." But it isn't. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the tag office to see that phrase all over their official signs. In New York State the same government office was the Department of Motor Vehicles (that's "vehicle" without the H pronounced, thank you). Our slang was to call it the "DMV." My hope is that Georgia's Department of Transportation simply posted that on the sign to aid the people who might not realize that it is, in fact, a nickname.

Another difference I noticed was the expression "tennis shoes" referring to any and all styles of sneaker. Now I may just be nitpicking at this point, but I always pictured tennis shoes as crisp, white, and specifically made for tennis. So when I was told that I needed to wear khakis and tennis shoes to marching band on Friday, I couldn't help but wonder for a fleeting moment if my cross trainers would be alright. Lucky for me, I figured this one out quickly and didn't embarrass myself by asking my new, Georgia-born friends for clarification.

I'm sure I could go on for days about all of the tiny differences in the vernacular of the Georgia native from my own, but I won't. I'll bring up just one more: iced tea. To me, "tea" means hot, and "iced tea" means the sugar comes in packets on the side. As I learned quickly and with some mild gustatory discomfort, in Georgia "tea" is cold and very, very sweet. You have to ask is you want it hot or unsweetened. The proper terms are "sweet tea." "unsweet tea," and "hot tea." None of those phrases slip easily out of my mouth, even after five years, but I do make sure to specify and order myself an "unsweetened iced tea" in restaurants. Once while talking about this is with my southern friends we jokingly came up with a theory explaining the difference. The substance referred to simply as "tea" directly relates to climate patterns. The south is warm, so residents are most likely to drink iced tea to cool down, therefore they will refer to iced tea simply as "tea." In the north where it gets cold, residents must drink hot tea in the winter to warm up, thus to them this is simply "tea." It may seem like a stretch, but maybe we were on to something. Neither way is more correct than the other, they are simply different, so maybe environmental factors do, in fact, play a role in speech patterns.

Being new somewhere is difficult, and so is talking differently than everyone else. I've experienced my fair share of teasing, both friendly and otherwise, because the words I use or the way I pronounce them. I try not to return the gesture, though I sometimes will have debates with friends about the correctness of their way of saying things against my own. These debates almost never reach a true conclusion, though, and it is usually decided that either way is correct. There is a simple explanation for this. Most of the small differences, though they may sound odd and incorrect to me, are perfectly acceptable variations on the English language. My intent is not to judge, but to point out a few of the differences that may not even occur to someone who has lived here their entire life, but if glaringly apparent to someone like me every single day. I hope I can shed some light on what it is like to live in an area where the culture is very, very different from the one in which you were born.