How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk: The New York Times Dialect Quiz

This is a very cool interactive quiz you can take on New York Times‘s website to see how your dialect compares to the rest of the United States. There are twenty five questions in all. I answered “I have no word for this” to five questions. This is what my heat map looked like at the end:

My dialect per New York Times's quiz.

My dialect per New York Times’s quiz.

So of course, I am most similar to speaking like a Southerner (I do say “y’all” when referring to a group of two or more people, after all), but it’s strange that the two cities I am most similar to are Baltimore and Newark.

How about you?

Jeopardy! Is Now in Its 30th Season

Jeopardy!‘s 30th season (the current incarnation of the syndicated show) will premiere tonight (September 16). To commemorate the occasion, The Daily Beast compiled videos of some of the “craziest answers, wackiest stories, and unforgettable people who helped make the iconic game show just that—iconic—for these past three decades.”:

This one might take the cake:

This is a case of an amazing answer being shot down on the technicality that it wasn’t on Trebek’s cue card. Ken Jennings, who won for 74 straight days, pulling in over $2 million dollars, threw out this little gem in response to a question about a term that can be both garden tool and immoral pleasure seeker. The best part of the video is the brief pause before everyone realizes what Jennings had just said. Even Trebek was caught off guard. 

More here.