The 'wrong word' trick that fixed my dialogue

I kept writing characters who all sounded like me, so I tried swapping in words from the era or setting they live in, like using 'telephone' instead of 'phone' for a 1940s character. It worked way better than I expected, my last prompt about a diner waitress got 30 upvotes because the dialogue finally felt distinct. Has anyone else tried a vocabulary swap to separate their characters, or do you use a different method?

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hall.nora22d ago

So the question is, did the swap actually change the way the character thinks, or did you just swap out a few nouns and call it a day? Cause I've seen people do that and it just feels like they put a costume on the same voice. What happens when your 1940s waitress has to talk about something that didn't exist back then, like a smartphone or the internet? Does she just not have an opinion, or do you rewrite the whole scene around what she'd actually know? Maybe it's just me, but the words are only half the battle, the real trick is changing how they reason about stuff.