It's Just How I Talk

All right, y'all, we've gotten to the bottom of the "y'all" thing. I took a Quiz called What Kind of American English Do You Speak?, linked from my friend Wyatt's blog, and here were my results:

Your Linguistic Profile:

50% General American English

30% Yankee

20% Dixie

0% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

You only have to answer 20 questions to get your answers, though there isn't any breakdown about which answers got calculated how. So we know about y'all, but I'll just keep on guessing about what other 15% of what flows outta my mouth is technically DixieSpeech. (It's true that my tired, low-energy students one day balked at being told they were sitting like bumps on a dill pickle. Props to the indigenous metaphors of Franklin, Tennessee!)

Oh, and yes, I also find the "five types" of American English to be almost shockingly parochial, but what are you gonna do, it's a blog quiz.

Another online quiz tells me that if I were a novel, I would be The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (which I have not read). What this means about me is apparently this:

Deeply rooted in a religious background, you have since become both isolated and schizophrenic. You were naively sure that your actions would help people, but of course they were resistant to your message and ultimately disaster ensued. Since you can see so many sides of the same issue, you are both wise beyond your years and tied to worthless perspectives. If you were a type of waffle, it would be Belgian.

Um, no religious upbringing, so I dunno about that. I'm a graduate student, so "isolated" and "schizophrenic" are total no-brainers; no props to this quiz for figuring that out. You'll have to ask my students how resistant they're feeling to my "message," and if any of them wouldn't mind telling me what my message is, I'd sure like to know. Good to know I'm wise and worthless at the same time (also = graduate student). I don't know about the waffle thing, y'all.