My family said cue-pon, but I heard both cue-pon and coo-pon elsewhere. After taking French in h.s. and realizing that coupon comes from “couper” (pronounced coo-pay), which means “to cut”, I began saying coo-pon.
I grew up hearing pocketbook and even now I use that term interchangeably with purse.
Dresser v. bureau— for me it’s a dresser if it has a mirror and a bureau if it doesn’t! Just the opposite of @techmom.
Point is, the cot-caught merge speakers have only one sound here. The vowel in awe and dawn is the same as the vowel in cot and Don. From my point of view, these speakers are missing an entire vowel sound.
Fang Jr has dyslexia. A symptom of dyslexia is an inability to figure out which words rhyme-- dyslexics will say two words rhyme when non-dyslexics hear a difference. So to help him learn when he was little, Mr. Fang and I would play a game where one person would say "I’m thinking of a word that rhymes with " and the other people would guess definitions.
“I’m thinking of a word that rhymes with led,” one would say, and the other would say, “Is it where the children are all snug?” “No, it’s not bed.” “Is it the color of Santa’s suit?” “No, it’s not red.” Fang Jr. would sometimes guess words that just didn’t rhyme.
But the game became more complicated when, for example, I would say I was thinking of a word that rhymes with walking and the other people would ask if it was what was hung by the chimney with care. And I was like, wait, what? We soon realized my dialect was different from Mr. Fang’s and Fang Jr’s.
Caught and cot have always sounded different to me, but I couldn’t tell pen from pin till my 40s.
Don and Dawn - I hear the difference
Frog and Dog - they rhyme
A little while back, at a grocery catering to students in a southern university town,with many students from the northeast, a young woman told the cashier and bagger, “hope y’all guys have a great day!” I kind of want to incorporate that into my own vocabulary. I love it. I have only heard it the once.
The “Philly” accent sounds also like S. Jersey, and the “Bronx” accent could be my N. Jersey neighbors. Coming from central Jersey, I, of course, do not have an accent.
As far as “I could care less”–I have argued forever (because it’s how I heard it when it first became a thing–that it originally had a sarcastic tone to it, with the unstated “but it’s hard to see how…” or some such. Maybe that was just my assumption, but it always sounded that way. Now, of course, it’s just a set of words that, admittedly, don’t make sense, but whose meaning is understood.
Here are two that you see in the press that drive me crazy:
Nor’easter… I get it that some people pronounce it that way, but really is it THAT hard to add
“th”? Why not just write the word “Northeaster”? Nor’easter comes across as so pretentious.
Ouster… You see this in the press a lot now too. Ouster sounds like a person, as in “someone was ousted by the ouster.” But no, they mean “ouster” as the process by which someone is ousted. What’s wrong with using “ousting,” which is a legitimate word and cannot be confused with a person?
Regarding malapropism, “irregardless” is crazy dumb, just like “could care less” mentioned upthread.
Because no one actually says northeaster. Or I’ve never heard any one say it. Now " Montreal Express" sounds pretentious but nor’easter is just a kind of storm. In which you wear your sou’wester.
I grew up on Long Island (with the accent: Lawn Guyland), surrounded by beaches – the ocean on the south and the LI Sound on the north. As an adult with children, I live in New Jersey, where people go “down the shore.” Never understood why just a few miles west of LI they call the beach the shore.
Also, native New Jerseyans say “out of” where a New Yorker would simply say “from” —as in “I hired a caterer out of Philadelphia.”
One more: People from NJ pronounce “sewer” like this: sore. In NY people pronounce it like SOO-er.
I have never heard anyone in NJ say sewer like “sore” and I have lived here all my life.
As far as “down the shore” that’s what you say when you are going to go to the Jersey Shore. Once you are there on that actual stretch of sand by the ocean, you are on the “beach.”
I’m from New Jersey and I know of three distinct accents there. As you move toward the Hudson, you hear the New York accent so ably demonstrated by Amy Poehler in the clip linked above-- it has somehow traveled across the Hudson. If you imagine a NJ mobster, that’s the accent they’d be using as they plotted in Frankie’s pizza place. This accent is non-rhotic, which is to say, as with the New York accent, Rs aren’t pronounced.
In south Jersey you hear a Philadelphia-influenced accent. In northern NJ, more toward the west, is the pure, perfect mid-Atlantic New Jersey accent sent down by the angels. But everyone says “down the shore.”
Wikipedia reminds me of my white perspective here. Black people in NJ speak African American Vernacular English, so that’s a fourth accent.