Phone Poll

[Plane]

 I got a friendly phone call the other day from Oregon.
  I was very nicely asked if I wanted to participate in a poll, they already knew my name and phone number.

    I was asked my age and asked my zip code and whether I was using a cell phone, and what was the name of my county.

   " I live in Houston County"
    "You mean Houston" he said , pronouncing Houston as Texans do.
     "No Houston , not Houston, this county is older than the City in Texas and is named after a different guy"


      That was all.

       " Wait "I said" You have not asked me about my opinions at all".

         So he tells me that I am not the kind of guy that they wanted to ask these questions .

        Then he tells me he does not know what a "push poll " is.


         I believe that some of these polls are not managed by scientists.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I take it that the County in Georgia is pronounced either How stun or Hoo ston rather than Hew ston.

In my part of Missouri, the Hoo stons are Black and the How stons are White and there are no Hew stons.

But what do you think his poll was about?  I doubt that it was about how to pronounce the name of your county.

I doubt that the people they hire to do polls actually understand much more than what is on the stuff they are supposed to read to you.\

They had a habit of asking my age first. If I told them my age, they would say "We have enough data from your group" and then they would hang up.
This is irritating because I was busy and they interrupted me. 


So the next time they called several days later, I told them I was 37 years old and gave them the opposite of the answers that I normally would. It is neither sinful nor  illegal to lie to  pollsters.

[Plane]

I wish I had thought of that.

[Xavier_Onassis]

You were too old for his poll. They are contracted for results from a specific demographic, typically 18 to 45, sometimes 18 through 30.

People respond to advertising differently are different ages.

By the time people are 45, they are either loyal to a specific brand (they will buy Colgate regardless of the price, for example), or they will buy whatever is on sale or cheapest. In both of these cases, the individuals are impervious to advertising. What they are after is people who have not developed a specific brand loyalty.

They had all the people your age they wanted. The number they wanted was ZERO. You are too old for the advertising target.

If you have the time, it is amusing to screw with them and furgle their results. Your vote will be assumed to be applicable to thousands of people as part of a random sample.

They asked for the country probably because with cellphones, the location is not predictable from the number. For wired phones, for example, North Dade County is 681, 685. or 688, the three digits following the area code. We have to dial ten digits here because there are two area codes fr Miami-Dade: 786 or 305.

In a modern age, they would probably would not have chosen the name Houston for a name, as there are three pronunciations: Hew ston, Hoo ston and How ston.
I imagine that there are three pronunciations in Scotland. It is a clan name that means Hugh's town, or settlement belonging to Hugh.

Being a Scot or an Irishman in England or the colonies was not as prestigious as being a proper English person. But surnames in England can be British (that is, Celtic), Angle, Saxon, Jute, Norman French or occasionally even Latin, so affecting a different pronunciation might have been an advantage to some newcomers.

In my family, the name Haworth, always pronounced in England as HAH worth, was pronounced HAY worth, because HAH worth sounded to uppity, like one was putting on airs. The most famous Hayworth, Rita Hayworth, was really named Margarita Carmen Cansino. Her father was born in Spain. She was discovered at a dancing gig in Mexico.