YALP!

[gnomi]

...based on a comment from a caller on A Way With Words.

[Poll #956274]

(US regional divisions kidnapped from the US Census Bureau)

Comments

[fadagaski.livejournal.com]

I'm in the UK. This means I look for a shop to buy a bottle from. Water fountains, psh. You North Americans are spoiled rotten with your ready access to free water supplies. :P

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

I almost added a "I don't use water fountains; I only drink bottled water" option, actually.

Does the UK not have water fountains?

[fadagaski.livejournal.com]

Very, very rarely. You might get them in some touristy seaside towns like Blackpool and Great Yarmouth, but in libraries/schools/malls - nope. Can't remember any.

[ephemera.livejournal.com]

Ditto - they do exist, but they're much much rarer. As a child it was a Nifty Cool Thing that the park near my gran's had one.

In some libraries I might look for the water *cooler* which is at least as likely as a drinking fountain.

[fadagaski.livejournal.com]

You have water coolers near you? Lucky! All my local public areas are super stingy. :)

[tygerseye.livejournal.com]

When I went to school in Boston, all my friends called it a "bubbler". In my experience, is a Mass. thing. Could be wrong about that.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

What caused this poll was the guy who called into "A Way With Words," because I, too, thought it was a MA thing, but he (the caller) thought it was a Washington state thing (he was born and raised in Seattle).

[tygerseye.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. Now that's weird.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I thought so, too. Thus, the poll. :-)

[lensman.livejournal.com]

I use either bubbler or drinking fountain, because I think of them as separate things, I tend to prefer water from a bubbler over a drinking fountain because I tend to think they are generally cleaner.

[lensman.livejournal.com]

oh and what I mean by bubbler is the larger water bottle that bubble as it drains. Though I remember the drinking fountain in the park being called a bubbler by kids when I was young too.

[arfur]

But then, I've come to believe that Spring in New England doesn't really exist: it's simply an Eigenstate resulting from the varying superposition of Winter and Summer.

See, e.g., today's temperatures.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

I have believed for a while that Boston is allocated between 5 and 7 spring-like days per year, and other than that we get winter, summer, and mud. So I get worried when we use all our spring allocation in, say, February.

[moneypenny.livejournal.com]

The other day, while visiting a friend in another office in the building, I asked if she could point me toward the bubbler. Her quiet, grumpy coworker looked up and fixed me with this weird, moony stare. After a second, I finally said "...What?" to which he replied, "I just don't know why you would call it a bubbler."

"Because...that's what I'm looking for?"

"But it's a water fountain."

"And yet, obviously people also call it a bubbler, as you knew what I was talking about by my question."

"Yeah, but nobody calls it that around here."

"You're right. Let's be sure to make sure we all think and say the exact same things from here on out. Should make life much more manageable."

I don't think he and I will be friends.

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

Only if I get to make the choices about what we say and think! :)

[michelel72.livejournal.com]

East South Central represent! Too weird.

I'll be happy for spring if I ever see much of one. What New England calls "spring" I call "a nice day or two between 'freezing and snowy' and 'too hot'".

[lordavon.livejournal.com]

I needed to be able to choose the Mid-Atlantic AND New England.

I moved too much.

[perpet.livejournal.com]

My brothers, having grown up in Milwaukee, delight in asking very confused store managers in Arkansas where one may find the bubbler. They are a bit dickish, but oh, it's funny.

[oldblackbird.livejournal.com]

I think Texas should be its very own region, by-the-by.

;-)

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Yeah, probably. But I was running out of slots, as it was. :-)

[kalessin.livejournal.com]

These days, I'll ask where the water fountain is. But when I was a kid, most of the older adults called it a bubbler, most notably all of my school teachers and librarians.

[jencallisto]

Huh. I am not sure the U.S. Census Bureau divisions are really the right thing to use for linguistic divisions. I feel like Minnesota has way more in common with Wisconsin and Michigan than it does with Kansas and Missouri. [Though, I don't have a better suggestion off the top of my head... poking around a little online, and variants on it shows up a lot.] Though perhaps that's more based on vowels than on word choice usage. Hrm.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I knew it wasn't ideal, but I figured they were as granular as I could get without running out of LJ poll spaces.

[jencallisto]

Well, that's fair. It's a difficult issue.
Incidentally, upon thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I say both "water fountain" and "drinking fountain," though I opted for "drinking fountain" in the poll. And unlike with "soda" and "pop" I'm not sure which phrase is from which part of my background...

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

I use both "water fountain" and "drinking fountain", but I think I use the first one first/more. These days I rarely use the item being referred to though.

I marked the "US: Middle Atlantic" option, but given that a lot of my reading material was/is non-US (even as a child) and I had various foreign teachers (dual-language education from preschool on) my geographic location had serious competition in forming my vocabulary.

[abbasegal.livejournal.com]

I must admit -- before this poll, had someone stopped and asked me where the nearest "bubbler" was, I would have had no idea what they were talking about!

"Water fountain" is natural for me, "drinking fountain" not unnatural, but "bubbler" unheard of.

I grew up in Buffalo, with a year in Berkeley, CA. I've spent most of my adult life in either Northern California or Boston, but obviously managed to miss hearing "bubbler" while in MA. (I did manage to pick up "wicked cool" though, which I would guess is regional).

[rhysara.livejournal.com]

I can never answer these polls because I don't fit into one category, because at the time I was learning English I was back adn forth between England adn New England.

Clearly we should be able to choose more than one.

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you had the sense to make "Yay!" and "Boo!" checkboxes rather than radio buttons.

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

I can't decide which feels more natural, water or drinking fountain. Probably water fountain, because the more I think about it, the more wierd drinking fountain sounds. Actually, fountain turns into a strange word, too.