Having been taught at an early age by my mother, the English teacher, that the use of the term "warsh" was a sign of linguistic ignorance surpassed only by saying "ICE cream" instead of "ice CREAM" (go figure), I'm delighted to see a cultural history topic come up on this list that she would let me talk about without having my mouth warshed out with soap. Timothy Shipe wrote: > The most distinctive thing about this grace was the way we said it, > everyone at the table speaking in unison, with no one in particular leading > the prayer. Does anyone else remember saying grace in this way? Could it > be a custom of Pennsylvania Dutch origin? My family said grace in this way, too: everyone in unison, no one leading. The grace itself was another two-line rhyming grace ("Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest/And let Thy gifts to us be blessed," kind of a tongue-twister when you're five years old). This didn't come from PD ancestors, though, but from my father, whose grandparents had immigrated DEU > IL in the late 1880s or 1890s. I don't know whether my father learned it at home (where English only was spoken, BTW--this was after WWI) or at church (Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a denomination founded by 1840s-50s emigrants from Prussia to the Great Lakes states, so not by the PD). Perhaps, rather than being specifically PD, it's a Lutheran custom? Or a Midwestern one? Felicia Kruse IA > DEU > PA > OH (nothing like doing things backwards) fkruse@waonline.com