When it comes to the names of towns and cities, the locals don’t necessarily pronounce them the way you expect. Charlotte, Vermont, for example, is pronounced with emphasis on the second syllable, not the first — and therein lies a history...
The term palaver, meaning an idle or prolonged discussion, comes from the old Portuguese term palavra that British sailors picked up at West African ports in the 1700s, where palaver huts are places where villagers can gather to discuss local...
Everyone knows New Yorkers and Angelenos, but what do you call someone from Sheboygan, Wisconsin? Demonyms, or the names for people from a given place, can get pretty complicated, but there are seven rules as drawn by George Stewart, and Paul...
Why are some American place names pronounced differently than the famous place they were named after? Why is Cairo, Ill., pronounced “KAY-roh”? Why do Midwesterners pronounce Versailles as “Ver-SALES” and the New Madrid Fault...
A new transplant to Dallas wants to assimilate into the Texan way of speaking without offending the locals or forcing any new vocabulary. This is part of a complete episode.
Residents of Maine are called “Mainers,” people in Texas are “Texans,” those in Wisconsin are “Wisconsinites,” and people in Phoenix are … “Phoenicians”? Grant and Martha explain that there are...