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freeways (top) & highways (bottom).

I watched an episode of the terrible sitcom “Back to You” in 2007. It was supposedly set in Pittsburgh, but clearly the writers were unaware that there were linguistic differences between the Mid-Atlantic and Southern California. In a traffic report scene, one of the characters reported that there was congestion on the “freeway”. That’s how a Californian would say it, but exactly not how a Pittsburgher would say it; we’d say “highway” (or “parkway”).

The Psy Guy suggested putting this distinction to SeeTweet, and we see that California is the freeway capital. But Seattle, Miami, and a few Great Lakes cities (Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago) have substantial “freeway” usages as well. “Highways” are more evenly distributed, with a focus on the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic coast.

#jerrymealssaysitssafe

Last night, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Atlanta Braves played a baseball game that went until something like 2 in the morning Eastern time. In the nineteenth inning, the game was tied when an Atlantan player scored on a blown call at home plate, ending the game. The umpire, Jerry Meals, declared the runner safe at home despite the fact that the replays show the runner being out.

Baseball fans turned this into a Twitter joke, where one writes something obviously unsafe but assures everyone that, well, #jerrymealssaysitssafe. For instance:

Heading to bed now, but first I want to give all of you my debit card PIN number. #JerryMealsSaysItsSafe (from @JamesSantelli)

The jokes were sufficiently common that #jerrymealssaysitssafe popped up on the Twitter Trending Topics this morning. That led me to wonder who was tweeting about it. Was it only disgusted Pirates fans? Did Braves fans get in on it, too, to either soften or strengthen the blow to Pirates fans? Or was it just people who liked baseball, regardless of where they were?

So I looked up #jerrymealssaysitssafe on SeeTweet and got this map. Pittsburgh and its surrounding areas are obviously really prominent, but it doesn’t look like Atlanta got any more into it than other major Eastern cities, like New York or Boston. The West Coast hasn’t really gotten into it yet, but this map is from 9am Pacific time, so that’s not too surprising. My conclusion is that the rise of #jerrymealssaysitssafe was driven by Pirates fans (not Braves fans) and then picked up by other teams’ fans.

Want to make your own SeeTweet maps?

If you’re interested in mapping Twitter usages yourself, you can for free with SeeTweet. SeeTweet generates the maps you see below, showing the most recent tweets containing your search term. If you find anything neat, drop a line to seetweetmaps@gmail.com.

CTFU.

CTFU is short for “cracking the fuck up” (or, if Urban Dictionary is to be trusted, “chut the fuck up” and “chill the fuck up” (wait, seriously?)). At the Linguistic society of America meeting earlier this year, Jacob Eisenstein, Brendan O’Connor, Noah A. Smith, and Eric P. Xing presented some data [PDF] showing that CTFU was limited in geographic scope to a region between Detroit and Philadelphia.

This is a strange distribution, since it crosses a number of traditional dialect boundaries, and yet it seems to have some legs. More than a year after the set of tweets they used in their analysis, we see CTFU keeping largely to the same region, perhaps having spread a bit into the DC area. Altanta also seems to use it, but otherwise its main base of usage is from Cleveland to the NYC/DC corridor, with only a few people using it elsewhere.

Tracking thunderstorms.

Above you see the weather radar for noon eastern time on July 11, 2011. Below that is the SeeTweet map of tweets around noon, with tweets mentioning “thunderstorm” appaearing in northern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, as well as southern Michigana nd Wisconsin. That’s basically where the big thunderstorms were at the time.

“needs (to be) fixed”.

Another strange bit of my dialect is that I can say things like “The chair needs fixed” where speakers of Standard American English would say it either “needs to be fixed” or “needs fixing”. This particular syntactic structure is a pretty neat one; in some dialects, it generalizes to “wants fixed” or “could use fixed”. In fact, there’s a hierarchy to it. If someone accepts “the cat wants fed”, they’ll also accept “the cat needs fed”, but not necessarily the other way around.

The “needs done” construction is geographically localized to the Midwest and Applachia, as discussed in a series of studies by Murray, Fraser, and Simon. SeeTweet confirms this localization.

Shoobies.

The AV Club interviewed lexicographer Ben Zimmer on Jersey and Philadelphia slang some time ago, and one particular regional divide he talked about stood out to me. Zimmer said:

What’s cool about that is seeing the way New Jersey gets divided up by the New York sphere of influence and the Philadelphia sphere of influence; you can find a dividing line along the Jersey Shore where people talk about bennys and where people talk about shoobies.

And sure enough, we see that in SeeTweet. The map above shows tweets including the word shoobies. South Jersey and Philly (and even Baltimore and DC) show lots of talk about shoobies, but North Jersey and New York don’t. Unfortunately, there are too many other meanings for bennys to get a clear view of the opposite division, so I didn’t include a map for it.

Brand mapping.

A lot of stores have spread out over the country like a plague of sameness, ensuring that I can get the same uninteresting selection here in California as I do when I go back to Pennsylvania for Christmas. (If I bought Christmas gifts, this would really be problematic.)

But there remain certain localized stores that build cult followings; for me, these include Steak ‘n Shake, Wawa, and the supermarket I’ve mapped here, Wegmans. Wegmans locations are shown in the lower map, creating a crescent stretching from Erie, PA through New York and New Jersey down into Washington, DC. And, sure enough, if you map tweets about Wegmans, they neatly establish this same shape, showing that Wegmans lovers are right where you’d expect them to be.

The spreading double modal.

The double modal is a construction primarily associated with Southern American and Texan English, where two modals (helping verbs that don’t get conjugated, like may, might, could, etc.) are used. (Standard English only allows for one modal in a verb phrase.)

The best-known of these double modals is might could — meaning something like might be able to — and in fact this particular usage appears to have spread across the U.S. by now. However, double modals do not appear to generalize into other American Englishes; might would and especially might should remain mostly restricted to the South. This suggests that might could has been borrowed into other American Englishes as an idiom, rather than as a change to the underlying grammatical structure.

Pop vs. soda.

I grew up with “pop” being the word for a fizzy beverage. Maybe “soda pop”, but it sure as heck wasn’t “soda”. Then I went to college in the middle of “soda” country and was derided for my hillbilly term. It became part of my style, and to this day, people are surprised when I bring over a two-liter and declare that the pop has arrived.

The distinction between the two terms (as well as “coke” as a generic term for pop) is largely geographic. A large-scale internet survey constructed a map of the preferred term across the U.S., with pop dominating the Midwest and Northwest, soda dominating the Northeast, Milwaukee, St Louis, and the Southwest, and coke gobbling up the South. SeeTweet develops a simplified version of this map with little effort.