Funny/weird Regional Expressions: Share them here!

[Kathy in Cambridge]

lovedems' Dixie/Yankee quiz got me thinking about some of the weird regional lingo in the US. I'm from Boston and many of our words for things confound outsiders. Not to mention our pronunciation (hey, even I have trouble understanding Bostonians sometimes, especially my parents' generation). Here's an interesting website on dialects:

http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/index.html

What expressions are peculiar to your area of the country or your city? Here is a repost of some of the words we use for things in Bawsten:

Local to my area:

Trash can, waste basket="barrel"

Highway shoulder="Breakdown lane" (in Boston, it's the last place you want to break down, as it's often the high-speed lane in traffic)

Shopping cart="carriage"

Potatoes are pronounced "B'daydas"

Take a left at the next stoplight="Bang a left, Bang a Uey"

Couch, sofa="divan"

Dunkin' Donuts="Dunkies"

Rubber Bands="elastics"

Milkshake="frappe" (a Milkshake is Milk with some flavored syrup, but NO ice cream!)

Tomato Sauce="gravy"

Black & White Cookie="half moon"

Sprinkles on ice cream="jimmies"

Liquor Store="package store" or simply, "the packie"

Cold and Damp (as in weather)="raw"

Very="wicked"

[elfwitch]

1. San Antonio Speak...

any carbonated beverage = Coke
a convenience store = ice house
a container with liquid in it falls over = tumpt


It's hard to think of things because these are the words I use all the time and everyone who is around me more or less uses the same words.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

3. ice house? that's interesting...

I know-it took me a while to think of my list. There are many more but they are for names of neighborhoods and local monuments...

[elfwitch]

12. ice house... I'll explain

Back in the olden days when people had to go get big blocks of ice to put in their fridges, they would go to one centralized "convenience store". The big store in that part of the world was Lone Star Ice House. We all grew up with them. Hence, if you meet someone who grew up in San Antonio, you ask them what they call a 7-11, QuickEMart, etc. they will most liekly call it an Ice House.

Pretty much just a Bexar county thing.

[GOPisEvil]

14. There are no 7-11s in San Antonio.

There used to be, but Stop-n-Go (or Stop-n-Rob) bought them all before they were bought by Diamond Shamrock. To this day, you can find a few of the old 7-11s around (some have the doors still).

But yeah, any convenience store is called an ice house. Weird.

[elfwitch]

19. I don't think there are any more Lone Stars either...

One of the last ones I saw was in Converse near Jusdon.
The one in Kirby changed to something else years and years ago.

[GOPisEvil]

20. Yeah, I think you're right.

There was one by my parents' house too. I haven't been by there in years, but IIRC, it wasn't a Lone Star anymore.

Does this mean we're getting old? Dammit!

[elfwitch]

21. Alas, my golf carted friend, I think it does.

With age comes wisdom and crow's feet.

[mitchtv]

2. So don't I- Boston ese

stoop- front stairs in NYC
sooper- superintendent(Blgd Mgr)NY

dungarees- jeans NY

[Kathy in Cambridge]

4. I forgot about "So Don't I"-Probably because I use it frequently

My dad say dungarees and stoop-also Bostonese of the older generation...

[mitchtv]

10. older here

still say eh paught for airport
here in Socal I here shopping carts as buggies

[Loonman]

5. Heh, when I was in Missouri

When I was visiting a friend in Missouri and offered to go on a beer run, seeing how I was the guest...


"where's the packie?"

"the what?"

"the packie, you know, the package store"

"what's that? What do they sell?"

"they sell beer, man!"

"just go to the gas station or the supermarket"

"wha???"

[Kathy in Cambridge]

7. LOL-Mass is the only place that has "packies"

could they understand you otherwise? My accent isn't that strong...only the vocabulary and cadence is a dead giveaway (I talk really fast)...

[Loonman]

8. Oh yeah, easily

But I used the "Bobby Kennedy" movie accent so people thought it was funny and would buy me drinks.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

38. Connecticut has "packies" too

(Nine-year resident of New Haven speaking).

[Richardo]

6. "Picksburgh" is a gold mine...

Rubber bands - "gumbands"
Prepare = "Redd up"
Miscellaneous sentence filler = "N'at" (We're going dahn to P&LE Station n'at.)
You = "yinz"
Really = "rilly"
Steelers = "Stillers"
Local beer = "Ahrn City" or "Arhn"

...and many many more at:
http://www.pittsburghese.com/

[Kathy in Cambridge]

9. "Yinz" is weird-a Pittsburgh friend uses it

must have come from Germany or Eastern Europe. :shrug:

Here we use "you guys" or "youse", depending on the neighborhood.

[Odessey]

51. Pittsburgh/western Pa.

Actually, it's 'yunz' the 'u' is like the 'oo' in 'book'.

Rubber bands are 'gum bands'

To straighten up is to 'red up'

downtown is 'dahntahn', house is 'hahs'

Giant Eagle (a local super market) is "Jiniggle'

Iron City Beer is 'arn City' Beer

Wash is 'warsh'

Steelers is 'Stillers'

Yunz guys wanna go with me to da jiniggle store dahntahn to buy some gumbands before I haf ta red up da hahs and warsh the clothes so's I can set dahn and watch da Stillers play while I have a nice cold ARN CITY!

[JVS]

11. Remember that Yinz is you plural

Similar to the German ihr

Also

Imp'n'Ahrn- Shot of Imperial brand blended whiskey and an Iron City Beer

Chipchopped ham- thinly cut boiled ham

[EstimatedProphet]

18. Yinz= short for "you'ens"

in MO Ozarks it's pronounced "yens"

[Greylady]

13. Soft drinks are........

sodas, never *pop* in Florida. When we misunderstand what a woman is saying we reply, Ma'am? instead of *excuse me?*.

[htuttle]

15. I'm looking for a bubbler that dispenses soda...

...somewhere down by the lake, hey.

(so goes the Milwaukee-ese...)

[Kathy in Cambridge]

16. We call water fountains "bubblers" heah in Bawsten

bizaaah, idn't it?

[Bonobo]

35. You forgot the "X needs X" phenomena in Pittsburgh

For example:

"Car needs warsh". (My car needs to be washed)

[JVS]

45. needs washed

[Odessey]

52. Sorry Ricardo

I should have read your post before I listed mine - you had most of em' covered! lol!

[Kathy in Cambridge]

17. Here are some HILARIOUS .wav files of the Boston Accent

http://home.earthlink.net/~lnkn/accent.htm

[Interrobang]

22. Where do I start?

variety store = corner store (ie. Wal-Mart does NOT count; that's a "department store")

pop = sweet, flavoured carbonated beverage

highway = wide, limited-access, paved road where cars can drive faster than on municipal roads

hydro = electricity (because most of ours comes from hydroelectric power generation)

poutine = chips (french fries) topped with cheese curds and gravy (yuck!)

peameal bacon = back bacon, "Canadian bacon" (NOBODY calls it that here, though)

bag of milk = three 1.3 litre thin plastic bags (which you put into a "milk jug" and cut the top corners off for pouring) in a larger bag, sold as a unit

chesterfield = long piece of furniture that 2 or more people can sit on

Interac = debit card payment, nearly universal here because we only have five major banks, and only one debit transaction standard

[Kathy in Cambridge]

23. Upstate NY says "pop" for soda also

[July]

24. and "gin mill" for bar eom.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

25. From prohibition, no doubt

:-)

[skippysmom]

31. I believe the soda/pop line is somewhere between

Rochester and Buffalo.

My Albany-born husband and his whole clan say soda.

[baldguy]

50. a little more east of Rachacha

Here's a neat map:

http://www.popvssoda.com/countystats/total-county.html

click on a state, and you'll get soda vs pop statistics by county.

God, the Internet is a wonderful thing!

[uhhuh]

58. Isn't it though?

Is there anything that there hasn't been a poll about?

[C_eh_N_eh_D_eh]

26. What's so yucky about poutine?

Sure, it's messy and it will halve your life expectancy, but it can be quite tasty if it's done right.

[Interrobang]

60. Anything that includes cheese curds is, by definition, yucky.

Hey, I thought poutine was gross even years ago *before* the milk allergy got so bad I had to stop eating dairy products altogether, but that's mostly because I've *never* liked cheese curds. Chips with gravy (and vinegar) on the other hand... :)

[fudge stripe cookays]

28. Canada/America cheese differences

Okay 'Murcans. The hubby and I have constant conflict over the type of cheese I buy.

The first time I called Kraft singles "American" cheese he busted into hysterical giggles and didn't believe me when I told him that's what they were called.

He proceeded to explain that it is merely "processed" cheese. And that this is just one more thing that Americans have co-opted and called our own when it really isn't.

So if you go to Canada and don't want to look like an idiot, ask for "processed" cheese slices.

[Liberal Christian]

29. How 'bout if I just ask for plastic cheese? n/t

[Kat45]

27. RR, you forgot 'tonic' for soft drinks in Boston

That's a big one! :hi:

[skippysmom]

30. "grinder"

meaning a sub, hoagie, etc. in parts of New England. Preferably from a pizza joint.

I'll never forget the look the guy behind the counter at a Subway in Wisconsin gave my dad when he ordered a meatball grinder!

[ironflange]

32. Drive around the back roads of Alberta,

you see signs for "Texas Gates." The rest of the world calls them cattleguards, but in Alberta they're Texas gates.

My town isn't Cal-gary, it's Cal-gree. It's easy to spot out-of-towners.

Banff = Bamf

Special pronunciation for Edmonton, too, but it's impossible to put down in writing.

[scarlet_owl]

33. When I first moved to Illinois from St. Louis,

I stuck out like a sore thumb. The schools put my sister and I in speech classes because of our accents.

Here are some differences that still confound me to this day:

Champaign-"pop" St. Louis-"soda" or "sody"

Champaign-"sack" St. Louis-"bag"

Pronunciations are different, too. Here in Champaign they call hamburgers "hamboogers" and pronounce "pink" as "peenk". In St. Louis, "fork" is pronounced "fark", and "orange" is "arnge". I find the central Illinois accent to be annoyingly nasal. And I was the one in speech class.

[Terran]

46. St. Louis has a really distinct accent

I live in mid-MO, Jefferson City, immigrant from California, so I really notice it. "Sain' Lou-ees"

People here (in Mid-MO) say "pop" or "sody", not soda. Plastic bags from the market are "sacks".

A couple of things that are colloquial here, rather than weird pronunciation:

--A person asks another person just about any sort of question about the other person's actions, e.g., "Are you about to go to the store?" and the response is invariably, "Do what now?"

--When it rains, it's invariably "Good sleepin' weather."

--The space on the outside of a road, especially in the country, no matter what its shape, is invariably "the ditch".

--And here's my favorite...very bizarre, very archaic sounding: one doesn't ask, e.g., "Does your boss come into the office at night?" Instead, one asks, "Does your boss come into the office of an evening?"

Missouri is a very strange place.

[scarlet_owl]

55. Ah yes. I am quite guilty of many of those.

Good sleepin' weather especially. In St. Louis, hoosiers aren't people from Indiana, they are trashy folks. I also say things like "turlet" instead of "toilet". It gets on my husband's nerves.

[fudge stripe cookays]

62. And it had some of the ugliest men I'd ever seen.

Nothing personal guys, but when I visited in 1990, I had never seen so many men with El Camino (mullet) haircuts and handlebar moustaches in my life.

Hopefully things have improved for Illinois and Missouri ladies in the last decade or so.

[scarlet_owl]

63. Heh heh. There are a lot of those!

Especially around here. Luckily I found a hottie.

[Terran]

64. Having lived in Cali most of my life,

I have to agree--most of the beautiful people are on the west coast. But MO does have a surplus of big burly men, my preferred type, so I like it. Unfortunately, the mullet is alive and well here (sigh).

[lovedems]

34. Do you go to the market or to the grocery store?

In the midwest we always use "grocery store", but when I lived out west, I got use to calling it the market. When I moved to Burlington, Vermont it was market. When I came home to Illinois everyone looked at me like I was crazy! They would say, "It's a grocery store!"

[scarlet_owl]

56. In St. Louis, you go to the "star".

Any short ("shart") "O" sound is prounounced "Ar".

[IowaBiker]

36. We have a lot of words here for George W. Bush

But they won't let me print them here.

--Brian

[murphymom]

37. "Spendy"

meaning expensive. First heard this when we moved to Oregon.

Another one: "Armenian sample"

Heard this one in the Central Valley in the produce industry. Means something that was hand-selected to look especially good that is being represented as being typical quality.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

39. Minnesota and Oregon

Not sure how many of these are current, but here are the ones I remember from earlier days:

rubber binder= rubber band
parking ramp= parking structure
boulevard=the strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk
lay-by= what stores in other parts of the country call "layaway"
California hamburger=a hamburger with lettuce and tomato
ya =instead of "yeah" or "yes."
jackpine savage=the northern MN equivalent of a redneck
overshoes=boots
soft drinks are "pop."

One thing I've noticed since moving back here and eating in local Asian restaurants is that what I called "salad rolls" on the West Coast are called "spring rolls" here. Also, the Asian restaurants all serve cream cheese wontons, sometimes curry flavored. (???)

My parents used to call credit cards "charge plates," but I haven't heard that one in a long time.

My father and his sisters, who grew up in the northwest corner of MN, called cereal "breakfast food." Their word for a sexy young woman was "glamor puss."

The swampy country that extends over much of northern MN is "the muskeg," which sounds like an Ojibwe word.

Now that you mention it, I guess "spendy" is an Oregon term.

Another Portland area term is "bento," which is the Japanese word for "packed lunch," but which in Portland means chicken and/or vegetable skewers on rice. (You could conceivably find a chicken skewer bento in Japan, but definitely not with Vietnamese chili sauce on the chicken!)

The annual football game between Oregon and Oregon State is called "the Civil War."

[Terran]

47. In Missouri we have many words for "redneck"!

"goat roper"

"cordwood boy"

"tie hacker"

Pretty sure they all evolved from various low status professions; now they all just refer to a country redneck!

[marigold20]

53. Wow, I remember charge plates!

What about "Stop and go" lights? There are no traffic lights here.

[KamaAina]

40. Ho, you buggahs nevah heah Hawai'i kine Pidgin??

a potpourri of words and phrases from the langauges of the many ethnic groups that have settled in the islands...

"hemajang" = "stay all bus' up" = broken

"shi-shi" = urinate ("gotta go shi-shi")

"babooze" = dunce :dunce: ("Ho, dat Bush* stay one frickin' babooze, yah?")

"akamai" = clever, smart (opposite of "babooze")

"da kine": miscellaneous sentence filler (much as "n'at" in Pittsburghese, above)

much, much more at:

http://www.eyeofhawaii.com/Pidgin/pidgin.htm

There is even a Pidgin literature, in which authors such as Lois-Ann Yamanaka and Gary Pak have their characters speak this way. Just try THAT with Pittsburghese!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

42. I like da kine!

I had a lot of students from Hawaii, and they'd use expressions that were clearly from Asian languages.

For example, "Jenny guys" means "Jenny and the people associated with her." That's just like the Japanese expression "Masao-tachi," "Masao and the people associated with him."

Another one was "talk story," for "have a casual conversation." That's a direct translation of the Chinese "shuo hua."

The first summer session I spent at UH-Manoa, I happened to speak with a woman who had come to the Islands with her boyfriend, who was a grad student at UH. She got a job at the public library, and one day, an elderly Asian man came in and asked about a certain record of Chinese music. She looked through the catalogue and told him, "That record has been checked out."

The man did not understand after several repetitions, so finally, one of the "local" librarians came forward and said, "Da kine no mo heah."

A popular T-shirt that year read, "I go school just for eat lunch, talk story, fuss aroun'."

[rucky]

44. You givin me the stink eye?

[Dennis Quaranta]

41. Lightning Bugs

Outside New York, these are called fireflies . . .

[Lydia Leftcoast]

43. Actually, they were lightning bugs

when I was growing up in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

And welcome to DU!

[Madrone]

49. Lightning bugs in Michigan too ....

In Washington, where I've lived for a little over 5 years - no one drives a car, truck, or a SUV - everybody has a "rig"...

To this MI girl, a rig is a bigass semi - and even then it's hardly used, as "semi" is the term of choice.

Everyone here in WA also has a "5th wheel" - I still haven't quite figured that one out, although I know it has to do with either a big pull along camper, or a motorhome.

I also never heard "420" until I moved here - although that must have made it back to MI because my younger stepsister knows what it means now.

[baldguy]

48. Buffalo

This guy's website explains it better than I can:

http://www.geocities.com/libmary/bfloslang.htm

snip

The typical Buffalonian will still be shopping at AM&A's for the next ten years, after which they'll call the place "Bon-Ton's", pronounced as "Bahn-tahns". To get there from the "Tahn-ah-tahn-ah-wahn-dah", they'll drive on "The Youngmann" to "The 90" to the Walden Galleria. If the person's name is Alfreida, Sophie or Stan, she'll call it "da Walden Galleria Mall dere," or worse, "dat big mall where da Leonard Post used to be dere."

[northofdenali]

54. Everyone will be familiar with the usual "Sourdough"

and "Cheechako" regionals for Alaska - but in Fairbanks, we have some "local" peculiarities:

Fox water (actually a natural spring in Fox, Alaska, outside Fairbanks where many locals go to get drinking water)

Is the mountain out? Meaning, of course, Denali - the Great One. And she often isn't - the Mountain is so huge, she creates her own weather!

Nippy - usually applied at 40 below or colder.

Ice fog - literal fog of ice crystals, again around 40 below (see picture):


Plug in - what you do to your car so the ciruclating heater is on and it'll actually start at -56!

Mukluks - any boots made of, usually, caribou or moose hide; but only if made by Native Alaskans.

Lower 48 - the rest of y'all! (Excludes Hawaii)

Cache - storage building, usually on stilts to discourage bears:



Bear insurance - NOT pepper spray, especially in Kodiak (those grizz are BIG) - usually a small, handheld, nuclear weapon.....

Sled - snowmachine

Bush - not the pResident - any place off the highway system, which is most of the state.

Ditch diver - all those SUV's you see in the ditches after a fresh snowfall.

Breakup - what winter does, usually suddenly and messily.

[geniph]

65. Hey, NorthofDenali

"the mountain's out" means Rainier down south here in the Puget Sound region.

I can't think of any other regional expressions peculiar to Washington, probably because I've lived here my entire life. They're simply normal speech to me.

[mykpart]

57. In Dallas

liquor is sold only on one side of the Trinity River. So if you're on the other side and need to go to the liquor store, you make a "river run."

The store is always the grocery store. Shopping means at the mall or J.C. Penney, but never for groceries. Shopping for groceries is "goin' to the store."

And of course, anything you plan to do in the immediate future, you are "fixin'" to do.

You don't "make" dinner, you "fix" dinner. And when it's ready, you "take it up" from the stove.

[opiate69]

59. All of my old friends

back in Eastern Ct/Western R.I used "screw" for "leave"... "Damn, it's late.. I betta screw"

[maveric]

61. In Boston soda was "Tonic".

Unless it was coke or pepsi. Orange tonic, grape tonic, lemon tonic. Packies advertized "Cold Tonic".