I meant I was all for being against people “coming here” if “coming here” just means buying a holiday home and visiting a few weeks a year.
It’s bad for anywhere where all available homes for locals a brought up by people who don’t actually live in them
In Alaska, newcomers are called “cheechakos”, while those born there are either “sourdoughs” or Native Alaskans (or Alaska Natives, in the case of indigenous folks). There is a sort of unspoken contest that takes place whenever meeting someone new. It involves determining whose family has been there longest. It can be amusing. I usually won those “contests”, as my family moved there in the 1930s. My response to someone telling me “Well, my father came here in 1951” was always “Oh, newcomer, huh?”
Oh, got it! I misunderstood your comment (obviously).
“Now where’s that Inuit woman I’m supposed to wrestle?”
Heh. For the other side of that, a friend of mine headed off to New York City in storybook fashion — brimming with ambition, and looking to work with the locals who thought the same way — and, well, she wasn’t disappointed.
And, she helpfully spelled out for me, it wasn’t the folks who happened to be born there that she was enthusiastic about working alongside; the ones who, like her, decided to go to NYC were, y’know, the whole point. I mean, yeah, she was sensible enough to note that some Born There types might have the right mindset, and that some of the Come There types might not have the right idea. But the way to bet, she figured…
Mom’s in Blaine Wa..:there’s a lot of mostly empty housing and a dynamic where the Canadians would come over the border to provision.
No clue what things are like given current events.
An oldie but a goodie.
I was born and raised in Chicago. In case you don’t know, there is a BIG difference between being raised in the city vs suburbs. In college at the U of Illinois it always bothered me to hear folk say they were from Chicago, only to learn they were from a burb.
Flash forward 40 years. I have now lived in the Chicago suburbs twice as long as I lived in the city, but for whatever reason, a part of me still thinks of myself as a “city boy.” I have a buddy who moved to Chicago a few decades back. At this point, he has lived in Chicago much longer than I ever did, but I still somehow think of him as less of a Chicagoan than I. (Doesn’t help that he is from Ann Arbor and is a Michigan fan!)
Tribalism and self identity are weird things.
I always tell people I grew up near Charlotte and now I live in the Sacramento area. I’ve never actually lived in either city; I grew up in a smallish town ~20 miles outside of Charlotte and now I live in a suburb of Sacramento. But it’s easier to just say Charlotte and Sacramento because those are the closest places that the majority of people would have actually heard of.
Yeah - I get that. If I said the name of the burb I live in, no one outside of the area would know what state it was in. But I could easily say “a suburb west of Chicago.” Or even “near Chicago.”
It depends on the situation. If I’m not going to have any additional conversation/relationship with the person and don’t care what they think, I could just say “Chicago.” But if I care enough that the person has a somewhat meaningful idea of where I come from, I think the minimal qualifying language is worthwhile.
Yeah I think this the equivalent of “Come Here v. Born Here” in big cities. They don’t tend to be snotty about whether you’re from there, they do about the exact border that being from inside of qualifies you as from “there”.
Yeah, similar to what @Dinsdale said about Chicago, I have heard Los Angelenos complain about people who say they’re from LA when they’re really just from somewhere else in LA County.
I’m like @Dinsdale in that where I’m originally from or am living now depends on the audience.
I suppose I could adopt the “I’m from near [big city]” rather than “I’m from [big city]” formulation, but the people I’m using that degree of geographical specificity with are folks who wouldn’t know or care about that distinction either.
ISTM the goal is to give the audience a pigeon hole they can use, given their area knowledge, not mine.
I always used to say that I was “from L.A.” when I was talking to someone when I was out-of-state (especially if I was out of the country). Most people wouldn’t have known Culver City, even though it’s completely surrounded by Los Angeles. That’s where I lived from the age of 1 to 21. Now, I do live in the city of Los Angeles, but it’s an area that was gobbled up in the 1920s and still goes by that earlier separate name. It’s also the official Postal Service name. If someone in L.A. asks where I’m from I’ll mention that name. Far enough outside L.A.? I’ll just say L.A.
In Toronto, I occasionally hear immigrants talking about how Canada takes in too many immigrants.
I love the phrase “from away”. It’s what Mainers use too. I’m technically from away, even though I lived most of my life up until the end of college in Maine. I was born in Mass, and now I’m a damn New Yorker.
'Zactly.
That was me growing up in SoCal, me now in the greater Miami metroblob, and me at various other locales along the way. It’s “L.A.” or “Miami” unless I expect they have near-encyclopedic knowledge of the hundred+ municipalities across multiple counties that make up the whole shebang.
And don’t forget “Upper Canadian”. In a 20 year period, I, an “Upper Canadian” (their word for someone from Ontario) spent a total of 12 years in Halifax, where I heard that term enough times (I was born and raised in Ontario). Apparently, Upper Canadians are responsible for everything bad that’s ever happened in the east coast.
From the prairies, let’s not forget “Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark”.