Farsees

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Brian Stark calling from Tucson, Arizona.

Hi, Brian, welcome.

How are you doing?

Good, how are you guys?

Great, what can we help you with?

Well, I have an unusual pastime that has led to a very interesting question, I think.

I like to run across entire states, so I go for like a 500-mile run every once in a while.

What?

So, you’re forest gumping it, is what you’re saying.

Yeah, I am gumping it, yeah.

I’ve been gumping it for 31 states now.

I’m trying to cross all of them.

31!

Wait, so you go east to west?

Because when you get to California, the north-south, that’s kind of a run.

I’ve thought about that, believe me.

And, yeah, I try to take a scenic route.

So wherever there’s existing trails, that’s what I go for.

I try to stay off the interstates.

And so I’m a back roads trail kind of guy.

And doing that has led to me getting lost pretty much every day of doing this for the last 20 years.

And so when I get lost, the first thing I do is ask the local.

Are you calling from a payphone right now, lost, needing help and directions?

I may as well be.

But I ask people, you know, how do I get on to the next note I have in the urban legend of where the trail is supposed to be?

And people give me such a variety of instructions that I’ve noticed a regional flair with the way people give directions.

And that has led me to wonder what causes people to have a regional difference in the way they give directions.

And I’ll give you a couple examples.

In West Virginia, people told me, well, you want to go up about six Farsis.

And I asked, well, what’s that?

They said, well, you go as far as you can see, and then you go again.

And I’m guessing those people don’t travel much at night.

Or not very far at night.

So you contrast that with something I experienced while running across Michigan just last month.

And in Michigan, people often would say things like, oh, you want to take that one?

That’s good road up there.

Good road.

That’s good road.

What does that mean?

And I don’t know how that’s different from any other road.

Road is kind of a mass noun as an uncountable noun.

Like you talk about water or sheep, right?

Just like good road or good bread, good money, right?

Yeah.

That’s good money.

That’s good road.

I love it.

Instead of a good road.

Maybe it means the shoulder or the type of traffic.

But everyone nods in agreement when someone says that in a group.

And they go, yeah, that’s good road.

Oh, that’s good road.

Well, clearly you’re alive and speaking, so you ultimately get where you’re going.

But do you have to stop like a half mile later and straighten it out with somebody else?

Yeah, and this is where technology has gotten interesting because now I carry a smartphone.

And I can look up on Google Maps and even Google Earth exactly where I am.

But the maps are wrong so often that I have to stop a car to get a second opinion from the phone.

And the map will say one thing, and this happened just last month,

And it said you can go straight to the next town, but there was actually a gravel pit in the way.

So I had to ask directions on how to get around the gravel pit.

Yeah, and did you bring your climbing gear?

Exactly right.

What leads to all this?

Yeah, what led to all this?

Why are you doing this?

Really, what is driving you?

You know, I think I enjoy meeting people and seeing new things.

And traveling on foot, I run these things.

It gives me a perspective.

Maybe that’s part of the answer is that I like seeing that difference,

And I don’t want everything to be the same.

But it just drives that curiosity of what causes one group of people to call something good road

Another group to go by Farsi.

It’s funny.

Your situation is so specific and rare,

And yet it’s such a pertinent question to language overall.

The first thing I want to say, though,

You should work for Google,

Because if you’re finding all these map mistakes,

Dude, you could get a job.

Seriously.

You need to get one of those head-mounted GoPros

And the whole GPS thing built in.

Forget the cars.

Forget the Google cars.

They could sponsor you.

Google runners.

Yeah.

Right?

So the way regionalism is developed

Is actually really interesting.

The first thing is heritage.

So this is where did the people come from and how alike each other are they?

So if everybody is from a particular part of Ireland and they all move to a same, because this is what happens.

Like when people came in the 1800s and went over from other parts of the world, they settled with people like themselves.

And a lot of times they basically recreated their home county or their hometown.

And so they all came with the same kind of language influence and they all probably learned English in the same way.

And they all influence each other with these ordinary channels of influence.

You’ve probably heard us talk about this before.

You speak like the people you respect.

And you speak like the people who you’re most often around, right?

So this is family, religious leaders, school leaders, political leaders, that sort of thing.

So that’s kind of all wrapped up in heritage.

But the other thing that happens, and this is,

I don’t know how this is going to shake out in the coming 100 or 200 years in American history,

But we’ve had large parts of America that have been relatively insular.

And so the second factor is geography.

Is there a river in the way? Are there mountains in the way?

Gravel pits.

Is there a reason that’s cultural that you don’t go to another place and therefore do not encounter their type of language?

For example, the utterly arbitrary geopolitical borders that separate Canada and the United States actually do separate to a degree the language.

Because if you’re in Canada, you are not very likely to go to the United States and therefore unlikely, even though they might even just be a few miles away, to encounter their variety of English.

And so you’ll get an increasing separation, increasing forking of the language, even just a few miles apart.

The greatest example of this geographic boundary that creates regionalisms in the United States is the Ohio River and the Ohio River Valley,

Where we can see, even to this day, old settlement patterns, some of them 150 or 200 years old,

Kind of are reflected in the language that we can record from people who are north of the river and people who are south of the river.

It’s a really strong difference that can be mapped.

You didn’t know the geography of the country.

But you saw the dialect maps, you could draw a line exactly where the river is because you could see it.

Let me ask you, as a man who’s done so many states, you said 31 states?

Yes.

You run across 31 states.

Do you have a website?

Go ahead and mention it on the air and maybe people can check it out.

Absolutely.

I’m statesrunner.com.

S-T-A-T-E-S-R-U-N-N-E-R.com.

Statesrunner.com.

Well, I’ve got to say, this is a great question, Brian.

I love what you’re doing.

Please keep us up to date on your travels, all right?

You bet.

Thanks so much, guys.

Take care now.

Take care.

Bye now.

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