Despite originally hailing from "accentless" Michigan (the quote marks signifying tongue being planted firmly in cheek as I dare to type that word), I am reminded on occasion that I'm just as much of a linguistic freak as anyone. One such epiphany came not long ago when I was talking to a small circle of friends about our relatives and found myself being the only one who pronounces aunt and ant the same (with my friends from Rhode Island, West Virginia, and New York City pronouncing aunt more like the second syllable of Lamont). Last weekend, I was reminded once again of my possible eccentricities when a family I was visiting on Easter Sunday started into a discussion about sneakers, a type of footwear that I typically refer to as tennis shoes (despite not having played tennis in a good 20 years). Recalling this conversation several days later, I decided that I'd delve into what I will call "the running shoe debate."

 Although typically a good place for finding lexical information along these lines, the Linguistic Atlas Projects (LAP) provides little data concerning this topic, since no question about footwear outside of a prompt for the names of work shoes was included in most Atlas worksheets. For instance, such footwear is addressed in only 2 of the 70 interviews in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR), with one informant mentioning sneakers and the other tennis shoes (and, it should be noted that the fieldworker introduced the latter term to the conversation). Thus, LAMR provides little useful data for looking at the regional or overall quantitative distribution of variants of running shoes.

Of course, I had to see if my collection of songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2015) could shed any light on this matter, despite my initial hypothesis that the corpus would have little to offer. Indeed, like the LAMR corpus, the 650 songs from the Billboard collection provided only two variants: Billy Joel's use of sneakers in "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" (1980) and Beyonce's mention of tennis shoes in "Crazy in Love" (2003).

I then proceeded to the Harvard Dialect Survey, which I referred to in at least one earlier posting (and which Susan Tamasi and I discuss in chapter 5 of our book). The shoe question was included as question 73 in the survey, and the results show sneakers and tennis shoes vying for the top slot in the survey, with 45.5% and 41.34% of the responses, respectively. Among other responses, gym shoes and running shoes trail the top two responses considerably, capturing 5.55% and 1.42% of the vote, respectively.

Thus, the results of the Harvard Dialect Survey, and the scant evidence provided by the Billboard collection and LAMR, show sneakers and tennis shoes to be running a fairly tight race.

However, I couldn't leave well enough alone and decided that I needed to take a look in one more place: Twitter. Using stratified random samples of tweets from the years 2012 and 2013 (10% of the Twitter activity, or about 30 millions tweets, for each year*), I found the following distribution of the four major variants for this item:

So what is the term that you usually use for "running shoes"? Feel free to let me know in the comment section below. And while you're thinking about your response, enjoy an excellent tune by Tommy Tucker.

*Thanks, as nearly always, go to Dr. Clayton Darwin and the folks at Illocution Inc. for use of their Twitter data collections and the tools for dealing with them properly.