Again, it's regional. I have lived in places (Washington state, I think, as well as the South) where to my ear people said 'carrot' like 'care'. But where I'm f

Again, it's regional. I have lived in places (Washington state, I think, as well as the South) where to my ear people said 'carrot' like 'care'. But where I'm from (northeast) carrot sounds like calculus, car sounds like calm, and care sounds like mare. Care is closer to cake ('longer'), carrot is 'short' like 'at'. Car is like with a little short 'o' mixed in, like in Spanish or the posh version of 'amen'. I wish I knew the formal phonetic symbols of these, but I don't. But disambiguating these is just what they're for.