I’ve mailed postcards to a ZIP code, nothing else on the address, and they’ve gotten to the intended person. The recipient is a character in a very rural area, and the post office knows that anything out of the ordinary is probably for Nelson.
Do they get slapped when they do that?
AC - Atlantic City, NJ. I’ve heard this used on the East Coast.
Does anyone use OC to refer to the Ocean City in Maryland or NJ?
Johannesburg is called Jo-burg
LA has a suburb called “Thousand Oaks”, which locals often refer to as “T.O.”
Many people in Southern California refer to Tijuana, Mexico as “TJ”.
STL is often used for St. Louis
Really? I’ve never ever heard “The OKC”. “The City”, “Oke City”, and “OKC”, yes.
I say “SF” for San Francisco all the time ( also “the City” ). I’m not quite a native, but I’ve been naturalized for a very long time ;). Never used NYC in conversation and I did live there for a bit and was born upstate.
The city and state on a mailing label is, as you noted, irrelevant, because the zip code is what’s used to route the mail. As a general rule:
1st digit signifies region. All your zip codes beginning with “3”, for example, are in the Southeast US (GA, AL, and FL (IIRC)).
2nd digit signifies state within the region. “30” is GA (the state has other 2-digit prefixes, of course.)
3rd digit is for the Sectional Center Facility that handles the mail for that zip code. Usually, for big cities, the first 3 digits are all you need to identify what city the zip code is in. “300”, for example, is Atlanta, GA and suburbs.
4th and 5th digit indicates the Post Office within the SCF. “30069” is Marietta, GA, a suburb of Atlanta.
Depends on who you’re talking to, I guess. Might just be the weirdos I know. Point is: Oklahoma City is often referred to by its initials.
When I first moved to this state, I had a job in a small town some miles from either OKC or Tulsa. Whenever anyone said they were going to The City, I would ask which one. I mean, it could be Enid, Tulsa, Oke City, Lawton, etc … right? Nope. The City is always OKC.
Some oldtimers will refer to Tulsa as T-Town. Don’t seem to hear that much from younger folk, ymmv.
Don’t call it that!
Yeah! Everyone knows that “the OC” refers to the Oshawa Centre mall.
Well, everyone who grew up near Oshawa, that is.
We do sometimes, but more often, we call it the District.
DFW pretty much always refers to the airport. The Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area, on the other hand, is called the Metroplex.
On the other hand, you will sometimes see hipsters make written reference to Portland as PDX.
Truth or Consequences, N.M., is called T or C.
I think most of the initials have been covered but there are abbreviations like B-more for baltimore (bawl’mer?) or Sac-town for Sacramento and more local ones I’m sure like C-ville for charlottesville, etc.
“KC” is pretty universally used, although you have to distinguish between “KCK” and “KC MO”.
I was so annoyed when the local CBS affiliate moved from Kansas City, Missouri to Fairway, Kansas and changed their very cool call letters KCMO to the much less cool KCTV. Serves them right for moving to a completely useless little townlet that exist mainly to generate speeding tickets.
No, ‘DFW’ is also often used (locally, at least–I’ve lived here for almost 30 years) to refer to the entire area, just as ‘the Metroplex’ is used. Sometimes you’ll even hear “the DFW Metroplex.”
The answer, in post 2. Yes, we call it Ele A or eléi (the second pronunciation is used either by people who think English is cooler than Spanish, or ironically as in the example from post 2). One of Loquillo’s biggest hits is officially called Cadillac Solitario (Lonely Cadillac) but everybody calls it by its first verse: siempre quise ir a ele a (I always wanted to go to LA).
I’ve heard it called Ele A by people from a dozen different countries, it’s quite general.
I don’t know if the residents of Las Vegas (NV, since there is also a Las Vegas, NM) call their city LV, but many Southern Californians who make turnaround trips to that gambling mecca often call the place LV.
~VOW