If you've got a copy of the Dictionary of Regional English, you know that "hotdish" is a casserole-style meal popular throughout Minnesota. A "quahog" is common word for "clam" in New England. And "Euchre" is a card game beloved by Midwesterners of all stripes. Next month the final volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English, or DARE, will be released by the Harvard University Press.

According to the U.S. Census figures from 2010, one in four African-Americans live in poverty. Less than one in five has a college degree. The question of how to help the community be upwardly mobile has been debated for decades, and it was on the mind of commentator Gene Marks when he wrote a recent commentary for Forbes called "If I Were a Poor Black Kid." "If I was a poor black kid I would get technical. I would learn software," Marks wrote. "I would learn how to write code. I would seek out courses in my high school that teaches these skills or figure out where to learn more online. I would study on my own. I would make sure my writing and communication skills stay polished." Gene Marks is neither black, nor poor, and some people wondered why he would be giving advice to those who are.

A Pew Research Center report released Wednesday shows 51 percent of all adults in the United States are now married — a record low. In 2010, a survey also conducted by Pew found that four in ten Americans thought marriage had become obsolete, but found that most people who had never married (61 percent) would like to do so someday.

Sociologist Amy Schalet was born in the United States, but she grew up in the Netherlands. When she returned to U.S. for college, she was surprised to learn that most of her American-reared peers had never discussed sex with their parents. Most of her Dutch friends had open, long-running discussions with their parents on the topic. This discovery shaped Professor Schalet's research through graduate school and beyond. She's published her findings in a new book, "Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens and the Culture of Sex."  

Later this morning, The Takeaway will speak with sociologist Amy Schalet about her new book, "Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex." Schalet compares American and Dutch families, and their attitudes about teenage sex. Beth Brotz, a parent in California, was thrilled to learn about Schalet's work. She talks about how she and her husband handled her teenage daughter's confession that she was sexually active with her boyfriend, and how their openness made them closer as a family.

Babies start to smile at around five weeks old; an ability that can influence many things they'll do for the rest of their lives. Social psychology research finds that the way we smile seriously affects how we're perceived by others. Jurors are more likely to believe smiling defendants. Smiling waiters get more tips. And parents are likely to pay more attention to smiling children.

Forty five years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty.” The idea has since been derided for describing the urban black family as caught in a “tangle of pathology.” But it never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers.

And with one in seven Americans living in poverty today, scholars are revisiting the idea.

After 18 years of being held captive, how will Jaycee Dugard break from the emotional and mental stresses that built up during that time?  We talk to Benedict Carey, science reporter for The New York Times, to look at if and how a person begins to return to normalcy after years of torment.

Read Ben's piece on the psychology of recovery on the front page of today's New York Times: "For Longtime Captives, a Complex Road Home."

A new study hints that losing a significant other has effects that last well after the Kleenex box has been emptied and thrown away. Linda Waite co-authored a new study on health and marriage and she joins The Takeaway with the details.

Your social security number is now a part of almost every form, including health insurance paperwork and the application for your library card. In fact, researchers reporting in this week's issue of the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used public data (hello, Facebook) to predict the first five digits of a person's social security number. And they got it right, on the first try, 44 percent of the time. With more on the dangers of our less-than-private individual identification system, The Takeaway is joined by privacy expert Peter Swire.

You can read more about the PNAS study by heading to the web site of our partners, The New York Times, and checking out today's article, Social Security Numbering System Vulnerable to Fraud, Experts Say.

Stuart Smalley’s famous words of self love: "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me" could be hazardous to your mental health. A new study out of the University of Waterloo suggests that people with low-self esteem actually sink into a darker state of mind when they articulate self-affirmations. This is just the latest from a new batch of self-esteem studies. Joining us for a look at how the self-esteem movement has morphed since it burst onto the scene nearly 30 years ago is Takeaway science contributor Jonah Lehrer. Jonah is author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

The news out of South Africa this week indicates there's something for the HIV-stricken country to celebrate. A new report says that HIV infections among young teens are down. In addition, the Western Cape is seeing fewer transmissions because more males are using condoms, and in the last three years the number of HIV infections has stabilized. Is the march of HIV slowing down?

The Takeaway is joined by Dr. Ernest Darkoh, a global health expert known for revolutionizing Botswana's HIV treatment program, to deconstruct the data. Click through for the full transcript of the interview.

Also, check out some intriguing data visualizations of HIV infection rates plotted against life expectancy, from gapminder.org.

Teenagers send thousands upon thousands of text messages each month (some as many as 24,000!). So researchers are beginning to wonder: what’s the effect of the furious finger work? Reporter Katie Hafner joins The Takeaway with answers.

For more, read Katie's piece on texting and teens in the Science Times section of today's New York Times, Texting may be taking a toll.

When I try to explain to people that I'm really into four square these days, I get a lot of blank looks. That's the natural reaction, given that most people's first association is of course to think of the schoolyard game. And sure, that's good fun, but I haven't played it in probably 15 years. The Foursquare I'm referring to is a kind of game, and a kind of social networking service -- and yes, you can score points, but that's only part of the fun.

Foursquare, from the same programmers who created the much loved and now closed service Dodgeball (they have a thing for games), is a mobile social networking game -- you "check in" from wherever you are, either using their iPhone app or via text message, and it lets your friends know where you are and what you're doing. This is useful enough as it is, and joins the growing ranks of location services like Loopt and Google Latitude that are all about broadcasting where you are and keeping track of your movements. Instead of connecting people through friends of friends, these networks connect people through what they do and where they go. Rather than learning about you by reading your list of favorite movies, I can find out what your favorite bars are, and how you spend a Saturday afternoon. Foursquare adds another element to this interaction, though: You get points for your check ins, and badges for reaching certain achievements; for instance, the Bender Badge is awarded if you check in more than four times in a row in any given week.

The points don't get you anything, except for the respect and admiration of other Foursquare users. There's a leaderboard you can check out from your iPhone, which ranks you against your friends and other people in your city (so far, the service is available in Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, LA, Minneapolis, NYC, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC). Since each check in means points, there's an incentive to check in with every little thing you do -- it gets addictive quickly. At the deli? Better check in! Waiting at the bus stop? Let the world know about it! Like the absurd mundanity of Twitter, Foursquare encourages broadcasting the small stuff, letting people know where you went for lunch. And that's exactly the appeal -- get to know what I do, and you'll get to know who I am. And there's an undeniable joy at finding yourself near the top of the week's leaderboard. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go check in -- I'm trying to earn some points here.

You can check in, too -- The Takeaway's playing a game with your morning routine, and you can revel in the glory of winning points by calling in to 1-877-8-MY-TAKE, by emailing us at mytake@thetakeaway.org or by leaving a comment. Let us know the insane and incredibly mundane things you're up to. Instructions are here.

Scott Lamb is a senior editor at BuzzFeed. Related:
• Where you at? Foursquare maps it out
• Playing with radio: Behind the scenes of The Takeaway's "Where are you?" game
• What are you doing right now?
• The thrill of checking in with our listeners

Ants do it. (says E.O. Wilson)
Octopuses do it.
Humans...mmmm, not so much.

There's talk going around about the science of P-L-A-Y, and specifically, about what play means, how it lights up our brains, and why we feel like automatrons when we don't play. Today's prescription is written by Dr Stuart Brown, co-author of the new book, "Play," and founder of the National Institute for Play. He joins The Takeaway for a break from the real world.

Talk about turning a notion on its head. What if your coveted winter vacation—the time when you leave the bitter, snowy cold behind and head for a few days of palm trees—could actually add to your winter blues? New research in psychology shows that interruptions from things we dislike may make us detest them all the more, whereas interruptions from doing something we really adore say, watching an episode of Friday Night Lights may highlight our appreciation. Benedict Carey, a science reporter from the New York Times, joins The Takeaway to explain.

Read his story on the dreaded commercial break Liked the Show? Maybe It Was the Commercials in today's New York Times.

The 25 Random Things phenomenon that took over Facebook in early '09 is waning, in part because it's the nature of viral memes to slow down over time, in part because, well, it was getting a little irritating. To anyone who spends much time online, the 25 Random Things idea is as old as time, or at least as old as the heyday LiveJournal. We've all either received clueless email chain letter forwards from friends, or, let's be honest, forwarded them ourselves, and the idea that such a lame part of digital culture has morphed its way into the walled garden of Facebook is somehow galling. Earnestness tends to take a beating online, and 25 Random Things is nothing if not earnest. Earnest, and not particularly amusing, either.

But now that it's happened once, it's more likely to happen again. Already a host of similar chain notes have appear in the wake of 25 Random Things -- Google 8 Ball, Random iTunes Answers, One Word Answers -- that you can expect to be clogging up your News Feed for some time to come. They're variations on a theme: Numbered lists that give you a chance to reveal tidbits of yourself in a canned way, seemingly risk-free and somewhat pat, if also occasionally illuminating and even sweet. Plus, they tend to be kind of long and time-consuming to write (even, weirdly, the One Word Answers).

So let's try starting a new one, something shorter, easier, less earnest and possibly way more interesting. Feel free to grab the idea and post your own notes -- let's see if we can make this one take off.

8 Things I Wish I Didn't Know

Rules: Share 8 things you wish you'd never learned, heard, seen, tasted or smelled or otherwise came to know. Then tag 8 people whose 8 worst things you'd like to know, too.

1. Learned: Exactly how a hot dog gets created.

2. Seen: Al Pacino in "The Devil's Advocate."

3. Tasted: Swedish blood sausage.

4. Learned: How you get rid of an eye worm.

5. Smelled: The reek that comes with cleaning out a rat's nest.

6. Heard: The sound a human body makes when it hits the ground from a great height.

7. Seen: The Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport after midnight.

8. Heard: The failed campaign song "Hillary 4 U and Me" -- that's nothing against Hillary or her campaign, I just really wish I had never heard that song. Even writing this now, the tune just appeared in my head again.

OK, your turn!

Scott Lamb is a senior editor at BuzzFeed.

A new study found that while the number of sexual predators using the Internet is significantly less than originally thought, cyberbullying through social networking sites is a bigger problem. In the age of Facebook, Myspace, and Lori Drew, how can parents protect their kids? Larry Magid is a blogger for CNET, but he's also the co-director of the non-profit organization Connect Safely and he sat on the Harvard panel behind this recent report. He joins Todd and Adaora to talk about how the answers to preventing internet bullying doesn't lie in science, but in parenting.

Psychiatry's number one diagnostic manual is being re-written -- and it's making everyone crazy. Gender identification disorder may be in, while sleepwalking disorder is on the outs. By 2012, the American Psychiatric Association hopes to have published a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) -- the diagnostic manual used to determine if a patient has a mental disorder. Proposed changes are already being challenged by patients, insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical industry. The New York Times science journalist Benedict Carey explains.

For more information, read Benedict Carey's article in today's New York Times.

European Pilgrims and Native Americans breaking bread together is an easy image to conjure up on Thanksgiving, but it belies the struggle and marginalization that American Indians continue to face. During his campaign, President-elect Barack Obama received strong support from tribal nations — but can he deliver on his promise to improve life for members of America’s 562 Indian tribes? Former Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.) joins us.