One problem w/ the memes about “Odysseus’ Boston accent”...he doesn’t really have one

Matt Damon and the cot-caught merger - a follow-up thought from my video about accents in the Odyssey. There have been some funny tweets/memes about “Odysseus’ Boston accent,” except...he doesn’t really have one, certainly not in one very central structural respect. So here’s a little bit about the cot-caught merger: what it is, where it is, and how it’s spreading. #accents #dialects #cotcaughtmerger #sociolinguistics #linguistics Cot-caught merger map from American Dialects (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 2006)