>After Hurricane Katrina I was drove, along with two others, to Houston. We drove straight through and stopped in the middle of night for Cokes at a convenience store in Arkansas. They had one of those coffee and soft drink areas and only styrofoam coffee cups of various sizes. I went up and asked the clerk where the soda cups were. "The what ones?" he said. I repeated the question and he repeated the answer. Finally I realized he was saying "the white ones," i.e. same cups as for coffee.

Confirms what I think about the southern pronunciation (why not proNOUNciation - it's the way they proNOUNce, or not?). It's not the drawl. It's the way they conveniently omit (omid, that is, and then omi~) most of the consonants. Or just mangle them until all the rough edges are smoothed out into something unintelligible. I had no trouble understanding anyone in New York, or anyone English, Scottish, Canadian, even Ozzie or Kiwi - I have trouble with my... what do you call the people with whom you share a city? We say sugrađani (su=with, grad=city, akin to Italian, IIRC, cocitandino, so the English construct would be concitizens, or co-citizens perhaps?).

>BTW, soap must be expensive there if it's worth the trouble of making your own ;-) (Oh wait, there must be something horrible I don't realize about capitalist soap, right?)

She came across a report on the toxicity of soaps, shampoos (it's not a real poo, it's a sham, just like shamrock isn't a real rock), etc. Found out that what we use isn't as bad as the more expensive stuff (go figure), but is bad anyway. And, know what, after a few weeks of washing my hair with this, it doesn't get greasy as fast, not nearly. The girls also love it.

And the youngest one just had an assignment for her chemistry class to do some chemical process at home, and make a video of it, so she donned the yellow rubber gloves and, under mom's supervision, made another batch. When I put the video together, I named the file "soap opus.avi". She actually didn't know that "opera" was plural of "opus", so I had to slip that bit of information in an en passant manner, during an unrelated talk. And then the pun worked, when she saw the filename again :).