Do We Talk Funny? 51 American Colloquialisms

Has American English become homogenized? Have our regional ways of saying particular things — sometimes in very particular ways — receded into the past? Or do we talk as funny as ever?

When I was researching an NPR History Dept. piece on lost American slang wordsrecently, slanguist Tom Dalzell — author of a raft of books, including Vietnam War Slang and Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang — told me: "For 100 years, we have trended away from regional slangs to a national slang. Radio, then television, then MTV and then the social media have all served to homogenize the slang that we use."

There is, Dalzell said, "very little regional slang left. Hecka or hella in Northern California or wicked or pisser in New England are examples of the few that survive." (Hecka, hella and wicked mean "very" or "really"; pisser means "stroke of bad luck.")

But what about nonslang regionalisms and colloquialisms? "There is a huge overlap between slang and colloquial and regional," Dalzell says. "Some would argue that coolis no longer slang but is so commonly used as to have lost the identity value and so is merely colloquial."

Cool.

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