Speaking "Midwestern"

I went through a stage in the latter half of my college years, particularly when I started working as an intern for a large corporation in the Fox Cities, during which I strove to eliminate from my diction any trace of Wisconsinite vowel sounds. This came about mostly in reaction to new friends from Indiana or Ohio teasing me about the way I said things like "toast" or "boat." The looong 'o' that sounded completely normal to me apparently sounded a lot like a foghorn to them.

So I worked hard to sound like I was from, well, nowhere in particular, eliminating words like "bubbler" from my vocabulary, until people were occasionally surprised to learn that I was from Green Bay. I still struggle with "toast," but I've mastered nipping my 'o's in the bud more than I have triumphed over the "you/ya" dichotomy.

It must be the German heritage of our area, but I say "ya" without even thinking about it. "I love ya," I tell the kids when I tuck them into bed. "See ya," I say to friends when we part company.

Our boy has taken note of and deeply internalized this, I learned during last week's annual meeting with our financial planner. We had picked up Happy Meals for the kids on the way to the meeting, hoping to keep them more content than they had been during last year's review, when a tall (and graciously fake) tree had been knocked over against a glass tabletop.

The kids were divvying up the goods as we started to talk with our money man, taking napkins, ketchup packets, and milk chugs out of the communal bag that contained all the "extras." I saw our boy pull an item from the bag and hand it to his sister, saying clearly, "Here, sis...this one's for 'ya.'" And he pronounced it 'yah,' like one might say to a horse that one wants to get a-movin'.

I'm going to have to work on that.