Quote:
Originally Posted by Centropolis
Cincy and St. Louis are practically doppelgangers. You have this heavy duty brooding Germanic, industrial, easternish influence as an island in a sea of rural lower midwestern and upper southern influences, and some stuff crosses over. Many failed farmer white folks (who also were often of German decent like part of my family) also migrated north into St. Louis from the Ozarks just like Kentuckians into Ohio and probably mashed up their accents and ways of saying things into the nasally great lakesish accent. I also think it depends on if you are from the Northside, Southside, or Central Corridor in St. Louis. I think historically, the Northside and Central are more purely Great Lakesy in accent, and sometimes almost Northeastern, but that's probably dying out.
I was called out for saying "worsh" (not "warsh") when I was in college in western Missouri by some rednecky dorm mates believe it or not.
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I've encountered words like "warsh" in the Appalachian part of Pennsylvania, and my grandmother, whose family came to Indiana from Berks County, PA, near Reading, where the German/Swiss dialect known as Pennsylvania Dutch was prevalent, said "warsh" and used some of the old regional words like "poke" for bag or purse and "bumbershoot" for umbrella. Oh -- after you warsh something, you wrench (rinse) it. A lot of the families in that area (Bluffton, Berne, & Decatur, Indiana) came from that same general vicinity and in the fifties and into the early sixties the older people still used those terms.