I grew up in Eden Prairie. I heard “The Cities” quite a bit. Wait…are you calling me a yokel?!
“Sin Cities” as a joke. Same with “MSP.” I guess airport codes have become nicknames. Mini-apple is used primarily by DBs. I’ve heard “STP” for St. Paul.
New Orleans: I heard “NOLA” more than any other nickname by locals when I lived out there.
I’ve never heard anyone from Boston say “Beantown,” because really, these days, where would you even go to find Boston Baked Beans on a menu? Never see it…maybe at Sturbridge Village.
Provincetown, MA, on the tip of the Cape is “P-Town.” And I suppose you can say just about everyone around here calls Cape Cod “The Cape.” Actually, I’ve never heard anyone say, “Cape Cod,” when referring to that region who is from New England.
Anchorage, AK is quite often referred to as “Anchor Town”, and the whole area comprised of Wasilla, Palmer and other small towns is always referred to as The Valley (for Matanuska Valley).
South Boston is known to all as “Southie”, and has a rep for hardscrabble working class and poor.
Port Hueneme (why-nee-mee), CA is popularly referred to by the military stationed there as Port Who-needs-me.
The “tronna” pronounciation is generally used only by old people now; it’s dying out as the Canadian accent is being gradually softened into a more generic North American accent. The way Don Cherry says it is not used by anyone under the age of 45, maybe 50.
At one time Buffalo was one of the ten largest cities in America. Today I don’t think it makes the top thirty. The city proper has half the population now that it had in 1945, and it is at best maybe one fifth as large as Toronto, depending how you define it.
It’s weird how two cities so close together went in such different directions.
A joke but partially true. As a long time Boston area resident but a complete non-native, I am amazed out how provincial the Boston area is. It isn’t just Boston and Cambridge (which would be one small city geographically anywhere else). It is every little suburb and there are hundreds of them. Most of them have nicknames or little jingles that go along with their name (Lynn, Lynn City of Sin, you won’t come out the way you went).
Rhode Island is even worse. You would think the whole state is really a small island with competing tribes composed of towns. I just asked a Rhode Island girl out. She had some hesitation about getting involved in a long distance relationship. She knows where I live and where it is but has never been there. It is 10 miles away from her house with no traffic. I managed to reassure her that true love knows no boundaries.
I suspect this is a universal thing. I know people who live in downtown Toronto who absolutely will not leave it if at all possible - the idea of going east of the Don Valley or west of Royal York is almost palpably frightening to them. I’ve heard people in Brampton complain about the idea of driving to Milton, which is the next town over and takes ten or fifteen minutes. I live in Burlington, which is immediately adjacent to Hamilton, and people in Hamilton have thanked me for “coming all this way.” There is no place in Hamilton I cannot drive to in under twenty minutes. Every city is better than the rest, every other city is a hellhole. It’s bizarre.
I’ve lived in Seattle a LOOONG time and there really isn’t a nickname locals use for it. My friends have advertised a tournament and used the word “rain city” somewhere in the title, which everyone knew what it meant, but no one would actually call it that in a casual conversation.
I’ve heard people around here call Spokane, WA “Spo-compton” which is incredibly ignorant if you know anything about Compton, CA.
I know a lot of Portlanders and I’ve heard them refer to it as PDX, which sounds cool IMO.
Just after saying Seattle had no nickname I thought of one. The area code is 206, and sometimes people say “two-oh-sickness” or “the sickness” but it could be the city or just the area the area code covers. It’s not commonly used though, only by very young people. I can only think of maybe 3 times ever I have heard people use it outside of underground hiphop songs.
Seattle is not like Chicago where non-Seattleites consider themselves Seattleites just because they live in a suburb, unlike Chicago where everyone within hundreds of miles of downtown wants to pretend that they live there. (I have chastised a friend from Crete, IL for telling people he was “from Chicago”, no you’re not. )
Oaktown is… uncommon, but not considered to be an outsider shibboleth, I don’t think. It’s certainly more common than the “Bump City” moniker (supposedly referring to traffic jams). That one hasn’t been used much since the Seventies.
While I’d hardly call it a “city”, the town of Burkburnett, Texas where I was born is referred to just about everyone I’ve ever known from there as “Burk.” Also, in the show “The Wire,” there are multiple references to Baltimore by the locals where they refer to it as “B’more”.
