Regional Dialogue

Every time I move, I have to learn a completely new language. In Chicago, it was waiting for an object to the preposition as in ,"Are you going with?" With whom? Nobody ever finished the sentence.

In the small town in Wisconsin, if you ordered barbecue, you got sloppy Joes. A hot dish was anything with hamburger in a casserole. A barbecue was cooking hamburgers outdoors on the grill.

Here in the UP, they know not of hot dish. Barbecue is slabs of pork ribs slowly cooked and slathered with barbecue sauce--the way it should be.

I have a friend who says, "I'll be over in a bit." Everybody seems to say "in a bit," which can be anything from 5 minutes to two hours. I told him to tell me he'd be over in a byte--a collection of bits.

In the Cincinnati area, if you said "Please?" in a telephone conversation, it substituted
for "I beg your pardon" or "What did you say?" Nobody knows "Please?" here in that context.

If you're talking to a real Yooper, his conversation will be punctuated by a "hey" after every sentence--sometimes after every other word.

Confused Muthah