A caller who grew up in Wisconsin says his spouse, who’s from Florida, teases him for such things as pronouncing bagel like “BEG-el” and dagger as “DEG-ger.” They’re just products of his isolect, the regional variants from his particular dialect of American English. In that part of the United States, there’s a lot of what linguists call bag raising and beg raising, so that bag sounds more like “beg” and milk sounds like “melk.” When such pronunciations and patterns are used extensively by lots of people in a particular area, it’s not a mistake, but rather a feature of dialect. This is part of a complete episode.
In English, you can express skepticism with the classic saying when pigs fly. In Tagalog, a similar sentiment is expressed with a phrase that translates “when the crow turns white, when the heron turns black,” and there’s a Hungarian phrase that...
Dax in Santa Cruz, California, wonders: Now that we’re into the 21st century, when will people stop saying that initial 20 when referring to a year such as 2028 the way we dropped the 19 in the term 1980s and just started referring to the ’80s? This...
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