I lived in Missouri for 6 years, and coming from New England and transplanted in the Midwest was quite a learning experience. The biggest lesson I had to learn was the language. Our New England jargon just wasn’t going to fly out there.
We had probably only been there a few weeks, when my first language lesson was introduced to me. We were moving into our house, the movers were bringing our furniture in. I told one of the moving guys that he can just bring the bureaus upstairs. He looked at me with a straight face, and said “you mean you have a donkey”. He thought I said burro, which is another name for a donkey. I learned quickly that in the Midwest it is called a chest of drawers, or a dresser.
My second language lesson came when we went to get ice cream. We stopped at a Dairy Queen style ice cream place. I went up to the counter and told the woman standing behind it that I wanted a vanilla cone with chocolate jimmies. She looked at me with 7 heads and said “whose jimmy”. In the Midwest there called sprinkles.
Another funny lesson I learned was eating in a restaurant. The waitress came over and asked me what I wanted to drink, and I said “what kind of tonic do you have”. She said “you mean hair tonic”. I grew up calling Pepsi and coke tonic, in the Midwest they call it soda or pop.
There were many other occasions where my New England words and accent got in the way of communication. People would ask me all the time to say car “cah”. I even got the “pahk the cah in harvahd yahd” request over and over. So eventually I learned to talk like them, but I never lost my New England accent which I am quite proud of.