> wrote:
> It appears to be regional to some extent at least. In this part of
> Kentucky, I rarely hear "stuffing" but have been told----as others have
> on this thread----that 'stuffing' goes in the bird, 'dressing' is a
> separate dish.
>
> As if that doesn't muddy the waters enough.... in the region of PA
> where I was raised, a lot of the folks made "filling". My siblings and
> parents still call it "filling" to this day.

I'm pretty sure it's a regional thing, but with so much travel and people
moving around these days a lot of the regional differences are disappearing.

I had come across a web site once that showed a study of where various
equivalent words were used and what percentage of the population used them
in each area. It also looked at different pronunciations of the same word
(you do know the word "coupon" as two pronunuciations, don't you). The
results of the study were presented in a graphical form with maps, and you
could clearly see how certain words and pronunciations drifted from region
to region.

At least with stuffing/dressing, there are just two words... for a sandwich
made on a long bread roll, there are many, including submarine, hoagie,
grinder, poor boy, zeppelin, etc. Where my parents came from (near
Norristown, PA), they were called zeppelins, so that's what we called them
in our family. Always tended to get strange looks when using that term
outside the area... only years later did I find out zeppelin was one of the
most geographically restricted of the words used for those sandwiches.

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