Don'tcha wish your girlfriend was a sociolinguist like me?

As a student of linguistics, I have been trained to keep a professional ear out more or less at all times. This is good when I'm trying to figure out the sounds of languages I don't know, but most of the time it only really distracts me from conversations that I'm trying to have by drawing my attention to the form rather than the content. Which is to say, I geek out when I hear something cool or unusual. One of my favorite games to play when I watch TV is 'Spot the Canadian'. (Admittedly, some of these people might just be from the Upper Midwest, but given the number of successful Canadian actors on American television, chances are pretty good that that 'aboat'in' actress is really from the Great White North.)
Needless to say, in my many travels, I often hear variations on English that appear to have bizarre, nonsensical distributions (just because the sample size is too small) or that I simply can't connect to any dialect group I already know about (again, small sample size). Here are the two most common and bothersome:

both: My pronunciation of this rhymes with 'growth', vowel and consonants included. What I hear a lot around Arizona, my new home, is something that sounds more like 'boulth'. I've also heard this outside of AZ, but here it seems especially prevalent.
else: My pronunciation is something like 'elss'. What I hear some other people say: 'elts'. I want to say this is a West Coast thing, but I have no idea.

These are bothersome only because I have no idea what larger phenomenon to connect them to. Let's increase the sample size. How do you pronounce these words?

I am a linguistics major

I am a linguistics major. This is a relatively new discipline, which, despite being one of the oldest studies ever (shout out to Panini) has only come into its own since the 1950s when people like Noam Chomsky really started formulating theories. Of course, back in the old days, everyone and their brother was a linguist in their spare time, including Jakob Grimm, one of the brothers thereof.
Because linguistics as something one studies at college is a relatively recent development, when linguistics majors go out into the world and get asked what their major is, the response they invariably receive is something like, "So, how many languages do you speak?"
Just for the record, I barely speak English. Now, languages I've studied - Spanish, Russian, Coptic, Nepali... the list gets bigger when you count 'languages I had problem sets about'. But that's not the point. Linguistics isn't really about speaking languages - what we would call 'competency'. That often helps, because linguistics is really about how languages work, and seeing how as many of them work as you can gives you a sense of what's out there. But your average linguist is not the most competent polyglot. Most linguists have a specialty, a particular interest in an aspect of language, or of one particular language, or in one or two theories, and this is what they focus most their time on. This could be something like the syntax of Malagasy, like the chair of my school's department, or how we say things without saying them ('pragmatics'), or how language changes over time, or even things like dialects, like Scots English or African-American Vernacular English. As you can imagine, there is a great deal of subjects which linguists address before you even get out of English.
Being an undergraduate linguistics major means that you spend a lot of your time making weird noises as you pronounce items from the International Phonetic Alphabet and being unable to have a full normal conversation when someone says something that is syntactically or semantically fascinating ('wrong' is also fascinating). You are also a huge target for criticism from psychology majors, who are just above the Science pecking order from you. You will counter that you do empirical studies with repeatable results, but it will not matter, because everyone you meet is an expert on language. But that's okay, because you can make really neat trees, and talk about the Sapir-Whorf theory.
Linguistics majors are misunderstood, although I will admit that lurking around the library making hissing and clicking noises is pretty creepy. But most linguistics majors I know, myself included, are genuinely entranced by the nuances and complexities of language, and quite capable of keeping themselves very happy without anyone else's approval. Linguistics majors are prone to bursting into excited tangents when they find something new, and because language is all around us, we are always finding something new. It makes for an exciting life of the mind.
That, and at least we're not sociologists.