Regional Slang Quotes

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

There is a whole host of people that have got an accent like mine, whether they're from Merseyside or Wales or the North West.

We're down in Mexico. It's for a bachelor party, so we go into a Mexican strip club... I go back with this woman down a murky hallway, and then without missing a beat - these ladies are all business - she goes, 'Go ahead, take out your dong.' 'I'm not taking out my dong. And by the way, who uses the word dong? If you want to be hip to the lingo, they're not using the word dong up in the States.

I think most people don't even know what 'woo pig sooie' is if they're not a sports fan or they're not from Arkansas.

Everybody in the world now wants to twerk. We don't twerk here in New Orleans, we bounce, we wiggle, we wobble, we shake, we bust it open, bend it over, we do it all.

I had a song back in 1992 talking about 'It's all good.' Then my partner Theo who used to work for 92.3 The Beat in L.A. started saying 'You know it's all good' on the radio and everybody took it back to their soils like that was the new Cali word. But that's a regular word form the Bay Area.

I bring a lot of 'y'all' up to New York with me.

Now, I do come from a part of the country where the people say that the only thing in the middle of the road is a yellow line or roadkill.

As a nation we love our dialects, and there is a lot of regional variance in the names for different foods - barmcake, bap or bun anyone?

I found cause to wonder upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language by introducing slang words. I think I heard more and more different kinds of slang during my few weeks' stay in London than in my whole "tenderloin" life in New York. But I suppose the English feel that the language is theirs, and that they may do with it as they please without at the same time allowing that privilege to others.

Whenever I write lyrics and an Americanism slips in, I always cut it straight out. I can't use the word 'babe,' for instance. It makes me cringe.

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.

Did you ever see so many pee-wee hats, Carl?" "They're beanies." "They call them pee-wees in Brooklyn." "But I'm not in Brooklyn." "But you're still a Brooklynite." "I wouldn't want that to get around, Annie." "You don't mean that, Carl." "Ah, we might as well call them beanies, Annie." "Why?" "When in Rome do as the Romans do." "Do they call them beanies in Rome?" she asked artlessly. "This is the silliest conversation.

If you look in a dictionary, the word 'Indianan' may appear. But the first task, the litmus test as to whether or not someone really is from Indiana or has spent any kind of considerable time in Indiana, is whether or not they use the word 'Indianan,' because no one in Indiana ever uses that term. We refer to ourselves as Hoosiers.

I'm from Boston - everyone says 'awesome,' but there are a lot of people in Boston who say 'awesome.'

In the rural South, 'Bubba' is like how people say 'dude' in California. It's a name for a regular Southern man. I know a Chinese Bubba, a black Bubba.

I love the Midwest accent.

I've had battles with writers who live in L.A. and were writing southern characters, because they felt like if they wrote 'Sugar' and 'Honey' at the end of every sentence, that would make it southern.

But I am Northern myself, and there is a certain rhythm of Northern speech that is very comical: that combination of the choice of language and the speech rhythm, which in itself is very funny.

'Uff da,' for the unenlightened, is Norwegian for 'oy vey' and is a common expression in Minnesotese.

I'm just an Irish biddy.

It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what 'tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.