Local thang

I'm not much of a traveler (and that's even an understatement) but I do know one thing about this great country of ours:

It's getting to be the same all over.

Peggy and I took a car trip through America's sunny Southland years ago, and when we went through small towns and little sections of big towns that happened to be close to I-95, I-85, I-65 and I-10, I was surprised to see that everything looked like we were still home. Same restaurants, same banks, same big box stores. Even the local police and fire vehicles seemed the same as home. Back in the day, all banks were local, and then someone at Bank of America got to thinking, "If McDonald's can do it...."

Of course, the good thing about that is, you can always cash a check, same as if you were back home.

It's all part of the Homogenization of America; we've blended into one huge small town, if you follow.

But there are exceptions and one of them is regional speech. I still notice southern accents, especially when watching college football, and there are things that people say in one area that no one else says anywhere. 

Here is an example that puzzles me. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is just about 100 miles northeast of Baltimore, but when the new list of new words for the new dictionary came out, it contained this entry:

jawn

noun. Informal. Chiefly Philadelphia. something or someone for which the speaker does not know or does not need a specific name.

Example: Can you hand me that jawn right there? 

📝 Philadelphians know that their favorite regional catchall term isn’t new—the first records of its use come from the early 2000s, when it started to be popularized in the Black community. Its addition reflects an increasing awareness of the term outside the region. Its ultimate origin is uncertain, but it may be a local Philadelphia variant of joint, which is used in a similar way in the New York City metropolitan area. 

This "jawn" word is in regular use right up the road in Philly, but in all my decades around here, I have yet to hear a Baltimorean ask me to hand them a jawn.  We prefer Standard English, so we call things for which we can't come up with a proper name a "thingamajig," a "whatchamacallit," a "whatsis," or a "doohickey."

Language is a fascinating thingamabob.