Fuck The North Too

Looks as if it'd be easier just to cut the Left Coast off from not merely the South (immediately below) but the entire continent; people are as fucking stupid/ignorant/nonsensical/post-modern above the Mason-Dixon line as well:

In a separate experiment, Nancy Niedzielski, an associate professor of linguistics at Rice University, told 50 NCS speakers that she was going to play a recording of a speaker from Michigan saying the word B-A-G, which she spelled out for them. She then asked the test subjects to identify whether the signal they heard sounded like byag (the NCS pronunciation), bag (the “standard” pronunciation), or baahg (a vaguely British pronunciation). Not one of the 50 subjects said that they heard the NCS pronunciation. “There’s just an incredible deafness to the local pronunciation,” Preston says—adding that the reason, in his opinion, is clear. “They believe that they are standard, normal, ordinary speakers, and when they’re confronted with evidence to the contrary, they reject it. They reject it in their daily lives, and they reject it even experimentally. They don’t even understand themselves.”

Maybe we should replace the slash-string of adjectives up there w/ "self-deluding," but we'll have our cake & eat it too, thank you.

Canada Holds The Line

(This part of The North may be exempted from the inflammatory headline.)

And the NCS dialect is, it appears, becoming more ordinary. Forecasting the likely growth of a dialect is tricky, but the NCS dialect appears to have spread in recent decades. Only in the United States, though: While dialect boundaries tend to blur at the edges and pay no heed to political borders, “the starkest dialect boundaries in North America are the boundaries between Detroit and Windsor and the boundaries between Buffalo” and Canada, according to Aaron Dinkin, an assistant professor of sociolinguistics at Swarthmore College. George Mason University maintains a database of native English speakers from across the globe reading the same paragraph. It includes samples of a woman from Detroit and a man from Windsor that highlight the stark contrasts in their dialects. Her classic NCS pronunciations of the short a and short o vowels belie the fact that her hometown is separated from his hometown and radically different Canadian dialect pronunciations by nothing more than a 7,500-foot bridge. Geographically, these people might as well live in the same city. Linguistically, they inhabit different worlds.

Prior coverage of shifty vowels.