dialect variation part II
When I was 10, my family moved to the Pittsburgh, PA area where I first heard the term "gum band" used to refer to what the rest of the world knows as rubber bands. Of all the outrageous things we heard in Pittsburgh that first year, we though "gum band" was the wildest, because it actually redefined a common, everyday item. We could see how it was called "gum" - being all stretchy and all, it just seemed, well, like reality was altered.Fast forward: my wife is from California, so she calls one of the four things you take out of a butter case a "cube" of butter. This again is by far the hardest for us to swallow (not that we boys actually swallow these). To us, it's a stick. And a stick can be all kinds of shapes - after all, you have sticks of gum, sticks of matches, sticks of dynamite, etc. But cubes have to be pretty close to square, and this butter just doesn't do it.
Now, I'll grant you, if you can have wide variety in what constitutes a "stick," why can't you have that same variety with cubes? You can, but we don't, or at least I never had before. What I notice is how much it affects me when a new term actually bends my conception of shapes and categories....as if to remind me that reality is only what I make it, and the classification of it is but a temporary arrangement...
Now here's my question. If you leave the butter on the counter in the summer heat, is it still a "cube" after it melts?
posted by tom @ 10:30 PM
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