Josh Katz

My first real rotation after I moved to Philadelphia for residency nearly 7 years ago was the well-baby nursery. Every morning, we'd present about 30 new babies born the previous day, and another 30-40 that were 2-3 days old and the South Philly-native attending would nod along. Every once in awhile, something about a baby would strike her as unusual and she'd respond to the presentation with "Call Noro." Eventually, it was my turn to get the instruction: "Call Noro." I looked Noro up in our paging system only to find that there was no Dr. Noro. This still didn't strike me as unusual, since the nursery was in the adult hospital and we (the residents and the paging system) were part of the pediatric hospital, I figured Noro must be a pediatrician on staff for the adult hospital to cover just the nursery. So I found one of my co-residents who had gone to med school at our program and asked her how to call Noro. She gave me a strange look, pulled up the pager system and typed "Neurology" into the service field. "Oh," I said, "I didn't realize that Dr. Noro is a neurologist." She laughed and said, "No, not Dr. Noro, neuro." As a midwesterner, neuro, to me shares a first sound with "nerve." Similarly, I don't pronounce water "wooder", and I find the word hoagie to sound vaguely dirty, rather than a generic word for sandwich. It was a hard first year.

So that's basically this book. Who says what how and what does it mean to them, displayed as a series of heat maps. It was fun to pick up my childhood town, Madison, WI, as largely an isolated bubble on most of the maps, reflecting the imported nature of most of the people there. It was sometimes hilarious to read about what things are called elsewhere. This was a webpage awhile ago and I had played with it then, but Katz has fleshed it out for the book. The result is both entertaining casual browsing and decently aesthetically appealing for a coffee table.… (mehr)

Peregrinations mentioned this book in one of her posts and of course I had to immediately get it. I live in a place where I am daily questioned on how I talk, and this has fostered a fascination with the English language and accents in particular.

This is a larger format book, not quite coffee table sized, but it could definitely hold its own with the art and architecture tomes. Each page features large full color heat maps, showing the prevalence for one word over another (or one pronunciation over another) in each part of the country. Some maps are mostly homogeneous ("roundabout"); some look as though someone drew a line through the country (usually an east/west line dividing north and south, of course) ("pyjamas").

MT and I had a great time comparing words and pronunciations, and laughing at the differences (and sometimes even similarities). We had fun trying to figure out his spirit state, and while it became clear that I've picked up words and pronunciations from around the country (mostly Minnesota), I was happy to see that my language still places me firmly in my home state of Florida.

An interesting look at the differences between us that are fun rather than confronting and a great conversation starter.… (mehr)