JFF: Regional Phrases

I moved from Iowa to Illinois in my early 20s. One thing that bothered me way back then, that still bothers me now, is that people around here say they are going to "go by John's house" when the really mean they are going "to" John's house. Same way for the grocery store, one of which is a chain store called Jewel/Osco. People say they are going to "go by the Jewel." I always think "well are you gonna actually STOP there or just drive BY?

grew up in Ontario & we called a couch/sofa a " chesterfield."
soda/pop was called a "soft drink"
I told my 8 year old son it was cold enough for a "toque" one day & he had no idea what I was talking about:)
At the grocery store I asked where the soda crackers where & was met with a confused look then he told me the soda was aisle 4 & crackers in aisles 6.....here in the US they are called saltines....

Do you stand in line at the grocery store? Well, here we don't stand IN line...we stand ON line. Do we go down to the beach or down to the shore? Nope, we go "down the Shore"...no need for that pesky preposition "to". And pretty much everything else Sharon E. said - I'm guessing she lives in the same general region as me.

I am from the deep South and when people are telling you a complete line of BS, you can call them on it by saying "That dog don't hunt".

If a Southern woman ever looks at you and says "Bless your heart", I can assure you that it is NOT a compliment.

I grew up in Michigan, lived in New England for about 10 or 11 years, then we moved back to Michigan.

MI = Pop
NE = Soda

MI = Water Fountain
NE = Bubbler

MI = Turn Signal (on your car)
NE = Directional

MI = rubber band
NE = elastic

There is a tendency around here to mash words together - "supposed to" becomes "sposta" and "Did you eat yet?" becomes "Didjya eat yet?"

In Massachusetts, they say "bang a yooey" to mean make a u-turn, and "wicked" to emphasize almost anything - as in, "wicked cool", "wicked fun", etc. Alcohol is purchased at a package store, or "packy."

How things are pronounced is different too. I was in Massachusetts, and often heard the classic "Boston Accent", with people dropping the R sound from words, but then sticking it where it didn't belong - as in, "Going to Florider for the winta." My MIL had that, plus isn't always good about enunciating properly, so when she was telling me about this bird by her bird feeder that she had never seen before, and then looked it up in her bird book and saw that it was a "wob-la", it took me a minute to realize she was saying "warbler."

AND I was told that "Mary", "Merry" and "Marry" are all pronounced slightly different - what???

Pittsburghese has an entire website!:

http://www.pittsburghese.com/

Where I live, we call tourists "shoobies". Decades ago some tourists would come to our beaches for the day and not spend money locally. They would bring their lunches in shoe boxes, and that is where the nickname "shoobie"comes from.

I grew up in New Orleans

We "make groceries" instead of grocery shop

and we are always goin' by our Mama and them's house

We are the land of Where you at and who do you stay by

Po-boys instead of subs

Street cars instead of trolleys

Parishes instead of counties

Neutral grounds instead of medians

I live in South Mississippi now, and still confuse people with my lingo.

I am from Springfield, Illinois. Moved away (New York, Ohio) and came back. It IS fascinating! I just have to laugh about the Soda/Pop/Coke debate. In Northern Illinois it's usually "pop," especially Chicago and the burbs. In Central Illinois it's usually "soda." And in Southern Illinois it's usually "coke." I caught an episode of "How the States got their Shapes" where the talked about this phenomenon. That is a fun show to watch!

There are two things that come to mind that are unique to Springfield (beside all the Lincoln sites). The cozy dog and the horseshoe.

cozy dog - It's actually just a corn dog, but there is a restaurant here called "Cozy Dog Drive In," so almost everyone calls them cozy dogs. Funny how I've always used the two terms interchangeably and just assumed everyone else did the same. Someone (in Ohio) asked me what a cozy dog was, and I thought he was being sarcastic. Oops!

horseshoes - open faced sandwhiches with fries and cheese sauce poured all over. White cheese, yellow cheese or a mixture of the two. I swear you could have a heart attack just by looking at one. For those with smaller appetites, I recommend ordering a ponyshoe.

Long sandwiches are called "hoagies" not subs.

Water is pronounced wooder

we have a iced treat called "water ice" which if you think about it at all is a puzzler all by itself. (Strange things are often called puzzlers)

Small streams are called creeks but it is pronounced crick. People who live low in the valley by the stream are called "crickers" and are considered low class.

Soda is called soda not pop.

Don'r get me started on cheese steaks....

Also from the south, grew up in the midwest. No one here has heard of pop or soda pop. It is Coke. As in "please give me a coke." "What kind would you like?" "Ummm, how about Dr. Pepper." In some places, a convenient store is an ice house. The thing that you push around in the store is a buggy, not a shopping cart. And when we are about to do something, it is "fixin' to". When I lived in Iowa, it made me want to poke my ear out to hear "I'm going to the movie, want to go with?" not with me, just with.

And I just want to add that I've never heard any of the phrases in your original post!

I grew up in Vermont, and fall tourists are leaf-peepers, anyone from anywhere other than Vermont is a flatlander, Aunt rhymes with want, "a couple-three" means two or three, apparently other people don't say Jeezum Crow, because I get laughed at for it. I also used to get mocked for asking people when they were getting back to town when they would drive from, say, Tempe to Phoenix. I guess in a large urban are, going from city to suburb is not considered leaving town...
Soft serve ice cream is a Creemee or Creamie, sprinkles are jimmies (which is not racist: http://www.snopes.com/language/offense/jimmies.asp).

Very interesting! Can you imagine if you went to another region, and talked like that!! People would think you were nuts! I for one think it is very interesting though. And I can't think of anything from our region off the top of my head either. Sorry.
I will be reading your responses though!

Of course the area I grew up in has urbanized a bit since I was a kid, so our local phrases are wanning.

Here's a few:

Stop and Go lights instead of stop lights

Bubbler instead of water (drinking) fountain

The other thing people do around here is they give directions like everyone knows where Farmer Brown's barn was 30 + yrs ago. LOL "You go down the road here to where Farmer Brown's was, well that burned down X years ago but everyone knows where it was, and make a right then go down to where the big tree blew down in the storm back in '65 ..... "

Extreme East TN here (but grew up in Atlanta, GA)

I was having a conversation when I first moved here and he kept talking about racing some guy on a narry road. I kept asking what he meant. He finally said," Narry road! Ya know, the opposite of wide!" Oooohhhh.

Later in a conversation with an older generation I was told of how you used to be able to go to either Greenbrier Park or Paint Creek Park to camp up in the mountains and hear the painters scream. This one confused me badly. I knew there was an artists community near Greenbrier at Gatlinburg, but why would the painters scream?
Turns out that painter is also known as cougar, puma, mountain lion, panther, catamount, but here-painter!
If your room or house is messy it is 'gommy'. (rhymes with mommy)
If something is nasty, smelly, rotten, it is "rotten as cairne" sounds like yarn with a k in front of it!
Instead of 'Are you going to the store?' it's 'Is you'uns going to town?'
If there are none left then it's 'Narry a one was left'
And if someone says they saw a bar, it's not a local watering hole. They saw a BEAR. (and they are prevalant here. on the way to the school I teach art on Fridays, in two weeks I have seen two bears dead on the interstate and on my Thursday school the talk is all about bear season and who is or will be hunting)
Tars are tires
anything ending in OW ends in ER here: "I live in the holler" (hollow) "I washed the winder" (window)

We require jokes to be told for your Halloween candy.

We are also strangely obsessed with where people went to high school. Okay that one actually makes sense if you saw the system of high schools we have here, still, anyone coming from out of town will ask what is this obsession?

bermuda is full of them!
around here one of the weirdest is replacing 'let' with 'leave', eg 'are you going to leave your kid run around the store without supervision?'
in spite of all the years i've lived here, i still have to stop and mentally interpret that one.
there are lots of weird sounds, like 'warsh' for wash and 'ballmer' for baltimore.
i love to go to utah, where creeks are cricks, the gorge is the gArge, and hello becomes 'h'LAY!'
:) khairete
S.

around here we have what i call "jersey italian".. where people use italian words frequently, but they arent pronounced correctly.. ill admit im guilty of it, after 24 years of living with my father i cant help it lol . to give u some examples
italian- calamari.. we say- galamad
italian- acita ..we say- ajida
italian- capicola ... we say gabagool
..i could write a whole page of these its so funny, its done so frequently, especially in north jersey

o0 and i forget about the whole "DTS" thing... if your going to the beach we say "we are going down the shore"

Hi Sherri-

I moved from northern va for many years, to rural SW va...

I still cannot get over being called 'honey' by everyone (in NYC, one would be PUNCHED for that - lol)

Also, the idea that shopping carts are called 'buggies'.

I am sure there are more...but those two always floor me!

Best luck!

Oh...also, England was very informative...

Diapers = nappy

Stroller = perambulator (sp?)

Trucks = lorries

Napkin = serviette

Trunk = boot

Hood (as in car) = bonnet

and SO many more...

I love the way colloquialisms develop...

Michele/cat

Well, I'm in Minnesota. I've always called it a casserole, but everyone here calls it a hotdish (referring to any number of meals cooked in one pan in the oven.)

To me, lunch is lunch and supper and/or dinner are both the evening meal, but people call lunch dinner.

I wish I had some colorful, fun sayings to share, but I can't think of any! A hat is a hat, mittens are mittens, and we wear parkas in winter (the coat.)

What is a "squares out"?
I will be curious to see if anyone in my area (WA state) says that we have phrases....I guess I don't get out much because everything everyone says sounds normal to me. And all of yours sound foreign!!

Born and raised in South Carolina. We say:
* fixin - I'm fixing to cook dinner
* cut off - Susie, cut off the light!
* Wyon't you - Wyon't you go to the store with me (why don't you)
* buggy - Grab me a buggy to put the groceries in. (cart)
* y'all - we NEVER say "you guys" - yuck!
* coke - anything carbonated is called a coke, never "soda"
* pecan - pronounced PEE CAN
* yes ma'am, no ma'am, etc - we always use our best manners even at age 42 ;)
* tennis shoes - any type of athletic shoe

My husband is a Yankee - upstate NY
* crick - creek
* kitty corner - catty corner is how we say it in the south
* you guys
* soda
* these ones - ugh don't get me started on this...
* sneakers - athletic shoes

I'm in south Louisiana.

We don't buy groceries, we make groceries.

Any non-alcoholic carbonated beverage is a coke.

The initial step of almost any dish I cook is "First you make a roux."

Pecan is pronounced pe-CON, not PEE-can.

Praline is pronounced prah-LEEN, not PRAY-leen.

Those tasty little crustaceans that live in mud burrows are crawfish, not crayfish.

Interesting! I can't think of any right now, but like Laura am curious to see if anyone else thinks that we have any in washington too!

When I lived in upper Michigan we called the creek a crick

Arkansas - all soda is called Coke "What kind of Coke do you want". A paper bag was called a sack.

Wisconsin - these people call a water fountain a bubbler. They also have ATM machines called TYME machines. Like do you know where I can find a tyme (time) machine? LOL

All places I've lived we never really called it a carriage it's a stroller

Oh and my DH's new thing is picking out everytime someone says fur instead of for. Apparently here in WI everyone says fur. I did not notice it until he started making fun of me. So I guess I do it too.

The only one I'm familiar with is "socials". I heard it used in connection with fundraising, typically "ice cream social". I've also heard it used in connection with a gathering involving food or a pot luck.

I grew up in the midwest, I now live in CT.

In CT..
- you eat ginders - subs are becoming more popular mostly due to SubWay with headquarters in CT
- at the grocery store you push a carraige, in the midwest it's a cart and you put the baby in the carraige
- we go to tag sales, not yard or garage sales
- we buy liquor at the package store
- as mentioned below, fall tourists are leaf-peepers
- I frequently hear the term "boxed lunch", that must have to do with the shoeboxes someone elsed mentioned
- we drink soda, in the midwest it was pop
- I'll stop for a "pop", means I'm stopping at the bar for a alcholic beverage

This is my hubbies favorite saying "I'll do it AFTER" or "We'll go AFTER". After what???? It drives me nuts and now he's got the kids saying it.

uh oh. i'm from kansas. either we don't have quirky phrases like that, or i'm such a kansas nerd i don't know the difference lol......i think most of the ones we use are borrowed from other regions....lol! any other kansans on here fill me in??

We call soda soft drink or fizzy drink.

There is a show on NPR on Sunday nights called "A Way With Words" which is all about this kind of thing - it's fun.

In Upstate New York soda was always "pop". You would never dare call it that Downstate.

I seem to recall debates about sneakers vs tennis shoes too.