My musing on the Reesey cup issue did not end with the last post. Oh, no, Reader. All language comes from somewhere and inquiring minds want to know exactly where that is.
So I bought a bag of mini Reesey cups and put them up by the white board at work. On the board I drew a little table of different pronunciations and started filling it in with my sample set. I got a few more data points, but everyone was too weirded out to fill in their data (though that didn't stop them getting into the candy). At some point during the day our trainer erased the chart and that was it for my linguistics survey.
The non-statistically significant results have the "Reesey cup" pronunciation in the southeast and the "Reese's" pronunciation in Michigan and the northeast.
Today our trainer asked, "Who brought in the Reese's?" We explained the nature of the experiment. He just looked at me and said, "Reesey cups, of course. What else would you call them?" But then, he's from Virginia.
One of the infants (about a third of the people in my group are fresh out of college) prairie-dogged up from his cubicle and made an interesting point. "But what about Reese's Pieces? Going by that, then you'd assume the other candy is called 'Reese's cups'."
The trainer and I both said, "Ugh. Reese's Pieces are nasty."
Then I realized, all these bright young things have never known a world without Reese's Pieces. No one born before 1980 would ever regard Reese's Pieces as the starting point. Perhaps there is an age divide as well as a geographical divide.
I need more data.
279 words | March 27, 2008 09:04 PM | Real true storyDo you remember how Reese's Pieces broke through into public consciousness?
When they were filming ET they wanted to use M&Ms to make the trail that ET follows into the house, but the M&M people (dopes) wouldn't give them permission. So Reese's Pieces got all that free product placement, and sales skyrocketed.
That was, by the way, the first time I became aware of the fact that the Reese people had branched out.
Now I'm loathe to look in the candy aisle. Watermelon tootsie roll pops. Is nothing sacred?
Posted by: Rosina Lippi at April 1, 2008 01:49 PMI remember Reese's Pieces when they came out before E.T. I remember them being nasty. I remember the collective "Huh?" in the theater when Elliott whipped out the Reese's Pieces to lay a trail for E.T. At the time, I assumed it was because everyone was thinking, "Those are nasty. Is he trying to drive E.T. away?" But maybe people just hadn't heard of them yet. The E.T. product placement made a real impression. The guy at work who brought up Reese's Pieces hadn't even been born in 1982 when the movie came out, but he mentioned it.
Posted by: 100 word minimum at April 1, 2008 06:51 PM