I was looking in the mirror, fussing with my hair earlier today.

“I need a haircut,” I said.

“Really?” R asked. “Why?”

“It’s getting on my nerves. It just needs trimmed.”

“Ah. You are from Pennsylvania.”

“Huh?”

“You dropped the ‘to be’. That’s a Pennsylvania speech pattern.”

Oh. Yeah. That.

“I know,” I muttered.

It’s one that has been pointed out to me before, that I’ve tried to make a point of correcting.

This got me to thinking about other peculiarities of the speech patterns/word usage of my area.

Until very recently, I ran the sweeper instead of the vacuum.

We drank pop, not soda. A college friend of mine, a girl from Pittsburgh, was very emphatic about this.

“I worked at Dairy Queen. You order a soda, you get something with ice cream in it.”

My grandma used to ask me to ‘rid up’ (some say ‘redd up’), or clean up the living room.

We also commonly drop the Gs from verbs ending in -ing: swimmin’, fishin’, hikin’, etc.

“Hey, you goin’ fishin’ this weekend?”

I am quite happy to say, though, that I have never uttered the Pittsburgh colloqualism “yuns”, as in “Yuns wanna go dahntahn?”

Since living in Western New York, I’ve picked up a few. My mom recently made fun of me when I said I had to take “the 90” to get somewhere. (We don’t use the article in front of the highway name in PA.)

So what about all of you? What are some local speech patterns you’ve been stuck with?