David from Kalamazoo, Michigan, is a former truck driver who remembers that his fellow users of CB radio tended to sound similar, no matter what part of the country they were from. Is there such a thing as an occupational accent? Many of those truck drivers sound like Jerry Reed from the 1977 movie “Smokey and the Bandit,” and C.W. McCall’s 1975 song “Convoy.” You can find lots of other samples of CB radio chatter on archive.org. People involved in the same enterprise, such as airline pilots and air-traffic controllers, will begin to develop similar patterns of speech. This is part of a complete episode.
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
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