Mary-Clare recalls that when she was growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, everyone she knew used the term hoosier as a kind of teasing pejorative. If someone did something silly, others would say You’re such a hoosier, the adjective hoozh, or jokingly dismiss someone as a member of the hoosioisie. The term had circulated throughout the US Midwest long before Indiana residents adopted the word Hoosier to denote denizens of that state. But the other sense lived on in the St. Louis area, once a great crossroads and gateway to the West and thus something of a linguistic island all its own. This is part of a complete episode.
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...
Meg in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, gets why the state highway department encourages drivers to use their blinkers when changing lanes, but placing a digital sign at the Sagamore Bridge that reads Use Ya Blinkah is, well, a lexical bridge too far. Meg’s...
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