Another little story for y'all (lawdy, iz ah gawn be talking lahk dis awl day?). I attended private school in the L.A. area from Kindergarten through 12th. The curriculum throughout heavily stressed proper English speech and composition as essential to success in the post-graduation world. The text books not only taught the right way, but also included numerous examples of no-no's. This confused many of us, as we had not observed any of this substandard lingo in our society. It wasn't until I was in High School that I realized that the majority of the criticism was, in fact, leveled at the way English was spoken in the South. The initial eye-opener was a guy who joined our school in 10th grade after moving with his family from Biloxi. Hoo-wee he might as well have been from Mars. Great guy, but needless to say he was "forced" by circumstance to alter his speech lest he be thrown to the lions.
It wasn't until my first year in college that I discovered that there was a worse living situation than an apartment. You would have to go several miles to the sketchy part of town to even find an apartment in my area. It was an actual insult to someone in my group to suggest that they may have been raised in an apartment, or even was acquainted with one of said dwellers.
So, one day the news mentions a tornado had ripped through a Texas trailer park and killed x number of people. Properly horrified, I had no clue why people would hang around a campground with a tornado bearing down on them. I mentioned this to someone at school, who informed me that it was not a campground, but that people actually lived in structures that were towed in and fixed to the ground semi-permanently, and that the victims of the tornado were hunkered down at home hoping they made it.
Well, I went from horrified to mortified. Living in a trailer? In the United States of America? Tell me it ain't so. Culture shock at its basic level. And now, ironically, I live in the desert in a teepee that I have to rebuild a couple of times every monsoon season. Life is grand, y'all.