Some finals traditions!
Pittsburgh itself is an incredibly unique city – near Ohio, but not Midwest, near Maryland but not Southern, near West Virginia, but most residents do not consider it Appalachian. We also have our own “accent insulate” here, as a consequence of Pittsburgh being settled during the time of the 13 colonies and the mountainous geography of the region. While the North and South have largely moved into the same “accent group”, Southwestern Pennsylvania prides itself on being different. The way of speech here combines morphosyntactic structures from Scotch-Irish (My car needs warshed, as opposed to my car needs washing), and has over a century of contact from Eastern and Southern European languages (The monophthongization of the MOUTH vowel, for example). The Allegheny mountains have isolated us, which only makes us more unique. Linguistics is not the only aspect of our city in which we are unique – our schools have some of the wackiest traditions in collegiate America, and since finals week is approaching, the better. The Dartmouth on the Monongahela, Carnegie Mellon University, offers a myriad of century-old traditions pertaining to the hellish finals week. The most prominent tradition here is known as Tartan Roulette. While this may seem like monetary gambling, which you can do at the poker club, it is a challenge to see if the student would even be able to see their final exams. In this 100+ year old tradition, a student goes to one of our on-campus dining locations just before a final, and asks the cashier to do Tartan Roulette. To the student two soups are presented – one is just regular chicken noodle soup (you can ask for a vegan option as well!), and the other is Perpetual 1-Day Blinding Stew. If the student chooses correctly, they will be taking their exam with a huge adrenaline rush, allowing them to perform significantly better. If you chose wrong, well then you’re fucked.