NOVEMBER 2016 ;e Costco Connection 71
SPECIAL SECTION
ARTS&ENTERTAINMENT
BY STEPHANIE E. PONDER
DO YOU SAY scratch
paper or scrap paper?
What about the casual
shoes you wear: Do you
call them sneakers, tennis shoes, gym shoes or
something else?
Whether or not
you’ve ever stopped to
wiches to certain kinds of bugs, Speaking
American, by Josh Katz, is sure to provide you
with insight about how you, people in neighboring states and even people across the
country speak. Complete with “heat maps”
that show who says what where, the book
examines the many ways Americans’ common language reveals a variety of differences.
Katz, a graphics editor for The New York
Times, grew up outside Philadelphia in South
Jersey. He remembers calling long sandwiches
hoagies, while his friends in New York called
them subs. “I was always fascinated by this
idea of where’s this line between these two
regions where hoagies become subs, and what
are other lines like that in the country and
how have they changed over time, and what
are the stories behind all these regional distinctions. And that was what really fascinated
me from an early age,” he tells The Connection.
So when, as a graduate student in statis-
tics at North Carolina State University, he had
to the Harvard Dialect Survey, which was
conducted in the early 2000s and looked at
how people use the language.
Katz updated the questions from the
original survey, put it online and started a
new round of data collection. More than
50,000 people answered 122 questions, and
those responses became the backbone of
Speaking American. (Readers interested in
taking the quiz can do so by visiting newyork
times.com and searching “How Y’all, Youse
and You Guys Talk.”)
After collecting the data, Katz created
maps showing the regional differences, such
on his university’s website. Not too much
later, the graphics desk at the Times discov-
ered the maps and offered Katz an internship,
which evolved into the job he currently holds.
When asked about the ideal audience for
this book, Katz is quick to say that its appeal
Not only did working on the book—and
The book notes that women found it too sim-
ilar to a baby carriage, while men found it
insulting to their masculinity. He continues,
“The inventor actually had to pay people to
kind of go back and forth in front of his
supermarket, pushing the shopping carts.”
Beyond the word differences and the history facts, Katz sees how the book taps into a
sense of pride of place—the kind of thing that
left this reporter astonished upon reading that
some people refer to doing doughnuts—that
car maneuver—as doing cookies.
As Katz explains, “One of the really interesting things about the book is that people’s
sion in people.” C
