Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

I abandoned uptalk; I stopped g-dropping and /ɪ/ tensing and did my level best to sound smoothly, blandly western and white. As careful as I was, my dialect still betrayed me when I relocated to New England for college. The way I spoke sounded completely normal to my ears, but drop that dialect smack into the middle of Massachusetts and suddenly I was a big ol’ hick. My roommate used to make fun of how flat and wide my vowels were; I spoke so slowly that one classmate assumed I had a speech impediment. I said “howdy” often, and in response one deeply stupid (or cruel) woman asked if I rode a horse to school and had electricity where I grew up. Each comment, no matter how it was phrased, was intended to prove one thing: I was outside, a stranger. I was not from here, and so was exoticized or ostracized accordingly.