Do We Really Say This Word Strangely In Western New York?

We don't notice it when we're talking with each other, but we definitely have an accent compared to other people in the country. One word, in particular, tends to stand out and really get under people's skin.

When we were little, our parents had friends from Kansas who would come up and visit for a couple of weeks. They had kids around our age, and we would hang out together in the summer. It wasn't until they pointed it out that we said certain words were funny. The biggest one for them was the word "car." Evidently, we tend to say the 'a' differently, and we really accentuate the 'r'.

Then the other night, after the Bills game, I was flipping through TikTok, and I found another person getting blasted for a word that she was saying with a strong accent. It appears as if she was originally from the Buffalo area but has since moved, and her accent has stayed with her.

She was commenting on how cool it was that Dalton Kincaid mentioned Vanderberg Elementary as his school in the football introductions. However, when she said the word "elementary" in her commentary, people just destroyed her in the comments.

It never even dawned on me that we might be saying it differently from the rest of the country.  Do you say elemen-tary? Or do you say elemen-tree?

Then it made me start to wonder what else we say wrong (or just way different ) from the rest of the country. Have you been picked on anything like this by someone who wasn't from around Western New York?