When I was four, my family moved from Maryland’s Eastern Shore to Chicago.
My dad was in academia, my parents had a growing family (my sister was born in 1976), he asked for a small raise and was denied, so we packed up and moved to Illinois for a better paying opportunity.
My memories of Chicago are generally hazy, and I know more of what my parents said of the three years we spent there than I actually remember.
One such story involves the Chicagoland sentence structure. Or, as my mom would put it, ending a sentence with a preposition.
For example, someone goes to the store, and someone else says, “Can I go with?”
I, being young and impressionable, picked up this Chicagoland linguistic tic in kindergarten, and my mom became alarmed. What was wrong with my speech? Why was I speaking this way? She was concerned, I think, that there was a learning disability, and she went to Queen Bee Elementary one day to talk to someone.
What she quickly learned was that people in the Chicago area spoke way. The teacher or the counselor or whomever it was my mom spoke to dropped several sentences that, to my mom’s Maryland way of thing, were constructed entirely wrong and ended with prepositions.
When we moved to Virginia in November 1980 — my dad took a job at James Madison — it didn’t take long apparently for my young and impressionable self to drop the peculiar Chicagoland way of speaking.
My brother, however, was put into remedial speech therapy at our elementary school because no one could understand his Chicago accent!
My last several years at Diamond I would often listened to WDCB, a Chicago jazz radio station, while at the office — Internet streaming FTW! — and some of the deejays would have that Chicago prepositional peculiarity.
I don’t know that I could summon those long-buried Chicago quirks in my speech, but I’ve been all over and experienced to so many varied forms that, as Sherlock Holmes says in “His Last Bow,” “my well of English seems to be permanently defiled.” And that’s really the way it should be. Keeps people guessing. 🙂
The first Windows I used was Windows 3.1. That was on machines at Central Virginia Community College. There was a classroom/lab on the second floor of the library building I’d sometimes use to write my papers on. No one seemed to know it was there, and only once was I ever asked to leave.
Ones I owned — Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 10, and Windows 11.
Ones I used at work — Windows 95 and Windows 2000 (EB Games); Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 10 (Diamond).
When I was laid off, I really should have asked if I could keep my Windows 10 machine, as it wasn’t upgradeable to Windows 11 (I checked), so it was going to be e-waste, but I didn’t. I’d have just wiped the drive and installed some version of Linux.