Fascinating: Results of a Harvard dialect survey.

Apparently, they mailed questionnaires out to people around the country about how they pronounced things (e.g., "asterisk" vs. "asteriks" vs. "asterik") or what they called things (e.g. the soda-pop-coke-tonic thing).

A lot of the things don't show the regionalism you might think would be there - perhaps it's because people are relatively mobile, and continue to use the terms for things they heard when they were growing up.

It would be interesting to do the study again, but collecting the ages of the respondents as well. I would tend to call an easy class a "gut class" (got that from my late-'30s born parents) but I know most in my age cohort would refer to such a class as a "blow-off."

Also, the dinner-supper dichotomy didn't have what I regard as the "right" choice as one of the choices: the "correct" distinction (IMO) is that dinner is a large meal that can be eaten at noon or in the evening, and supper is a smaller, lighter meal. Typically, in farm families, during the "active" season, dinner WAS eaten at noon and a smaller, more pick-up sort of meal was eaten in the evening, and it was called supper. And I should know because my grandma grew up on a farm and she was always explaining that distinction to us.

A couple of things the survey confirmed for me:

People around here DO call shopping carts "buggies". I was weirded out the first time in a store here when a clerk asked me if I needed a "buggy," I had no idea what she was talking about.

Incorrect pronunciation or word usage knows no region of the country - those things tend to be spread across the U.S.

and a surprise: I always referred to when it's raining but the sun is out as "the devil is beating his wife," which is apparently a more southern expression from where I grew up (northeastern Ohio). I don't know who or where I got that expression from, I suppose it could have been from someone who grew up in the Southeast themselves.