Speaking American

My first real rotation after I moved to Philadelphia for residency nearly 7 years ago was the well-baby nursery. Every morning, we'd present about 30 new babies born the previous day, and another 30-40 that were 2-3 days old and the South Philly-native attending would nod along. Every once in awhile, something about a baby would strike her as unusual and she'd respond to the presentation with “Call Noro.” Eventually, it was my turn to get the instruction: “Call Noro.” I looked Noro up in our paging system only to find that there was no Dr. Noro. This still didn't strike me as unusual, since the nursery was in the adult hospital and we (the residents and the paging system) were part of the pediatric hospital, I figured Noro must be a pediatrician on staff for the adult hospital to cover just the nursery. So I found one of my co-residents who had gone to med school at our program and asked her how to call Noro. She gave me a strange look, pulled up the pager system and typed “Neurology” into the service field. “Oh,” I said, “I didn't realize that Dr. Noro is a neurologist.” She laughed and said, “No, not Dr. Noro, neuro.” As a midwesterner, neuro, to me shares a first sound with “nerve.” Similarly, I don't pronounce water “wooder”, and I find the word hoagie to sound vaguely dirty, rather than a generic word for sandwich. It was a hard first year.

So that's basically this book. Who says what how and what does it mean to them, displayed as a series of heat maps. It was fun to pick up my childhood town, Madison, WI, as largely an isolated bubble on most of the maps, reflecting the imported nature of most of the people there. It was sometimes hilarious to read about what things are called elsewhere. This was a webpage awhile ago and I had played with it then, but Katz has fleshed it out for the book. The result is both entertaining casual browsing and decently aesthetically appealing for a coffee table.

Speaking American takes a close look at the different words and pronunciations people use across America for the same thing. Coke? Or soda? Highway? Or freeway? PEEee-can? Or pee-CAN? It's filled with fun graphs to show where regional variations occur. You can't help sharing this with others. There were a few words (pocketbook for purse, davenport for couch) I was disappointed that I did not find, but maybe these will appear in a subsequent book.