Countian means “a resident of a [specified] county”. For example, when I lived in W.Va. briefly I was a “Doddridge Countian” because I lived in Doddridge County. I have never seen this word in any dictionary, and I’ve looked in a lot of them: standard dictionaries as well as dictionaries of regionalisms and Americanisms.
A number of Google searches shows that the word is used at least occasionally in an area from Pennsylvania to Florida to Mississippi to Oklahoma to Kansas to Illinois and back to Pennsylvania. I coulnd’t find any reference to its use in places like New York, South Dakota, Colorado, and Texas.
I want to know about the history of the word. When was it first used? Was it ever used in Great Britain?
Does anyone have a better idea of the word’s distribution?
Don’t bother searching GQ for the word. It occurs only once, in a post of my own.
Interesting. It does not appear in the full text of the OED, although the similarly formed statesian does (with a quotation date of 1892). I doubt that it would be used in the UK, since the older shire tends to be used in its place in reference to counties and borough is what they’d use for what my picture of what county means in the US.
And we do use the connected word “burgher” occasionally to mean the residents of said boroughs. Usually tongue-in-cheek (“the good burghers of…”), as it has an archaic ring to it though. Local government units often seem to be drawn and redrawn at will without much reference to observable or historic features, so people probably wouldn’t identify themselves as being, for example, a “Waverley burgher” (which I am… sounds yummy, no?). I’d be more likely to tell people I lived in Surrey (unless I thought they were some kind of rampant class warrior and might strike me down for living in the County Of Stockbrokers And Their Whores).
When I read the thread title, I thought this was going to be about the aristocracy…
