This is a huge difference I’ve noticed between upstate NY and NYC. When we tell people in NYC “it’s about an hours’ drive away” they don’t always realize that means, at 70 mph, on the highway. It seems some of the people we deal with in our company have never even been out of the City. To them that means "Across town to the Bronx, in traffic) - i.e. less than 10 miles most of the time. They don’t realize how HUGE the state is.
Don’t get me started on the soda/pop crap. The stuff you drink is SODA. The stuff you listen to is POP, Buffalonians!
Bostonians, maybe, but the only time I’ve ever heard NYC dwellers use distance in miles is when they are talking about highway travel somewhere out west. Otherwise, it’s always a time measure, specified with or without traffic: 3.5 hours to Boston, 2 hours to Albany, 6 hours to the eastern side of the Adirondacks, 2 hours to Philly, almost 3 hours to go down the shore, etc.
Some people probably never have left the city, at least not while driving. But considering that driving across the Bronx, in traffic, might well take an hour, you could cut them a little slack.
Actually, I had the “you describe distance by time?!” conversation with a friend from Madison, WI, so I guess that backs up TheMerchandise’s perspective on weirdness.
I do! It’s them I want to cut me a little slack. They add territories to us. Right now, fer example, we cover from Delaware-Columbia-Greene counties all the way north to Franklin & Clinton, and from Vermont on the east too Otsego and Delaware & Hamilton counties. That is a huge frickin’ area. And they are also planning on adding Ulster, Sullivan, Orange, Putnam, and Dutchess. When we protest "But it takes 1 hour 45 min to get to Poughkeepsie!’ they can’t seem to understand that this means it’s simply not feasible for us to add those territories to our chapter.
and if you drink 3 you get 1 free; but don’t get a grinder with it or you’ll be too full.
Depending on who you ask for a milk shake you may very well get milk and syrup with no ice cream. A frappe would be understood as a cabinet but a milk shake is different.
Ah yes, this I understand and appreciate. I had a similar scaling problem with relatives from Europe, who seemed to think that they could drive to Washington DC, Miami, Chicago, LA and San Francisco - AND do sightseeing - in a 2-week time span.
We have a lot of “merged” French/English signs, such as “Parc Confederation Park” or “Rue Wellington Street”. This saves space on the sign where the main word is a proper name or is spelled the same in both languages. It helps that the French modifier is usually grammatically first and the English last. It looks strange until you get used to it, though.
A frappe is a milkshake with a couple of scoops of ice cream. (# of scoops depends on size/shop).
If you want a frappe, but order a milkshake, you’ll be dissapointed, and we won’t ask if you know what you’re ordering. If you don’t know what you ordered, you’re not from here, and not likely to come back anyway.
(Used to work in an icecream shop, and had that fight with customers a few times. As I had an ass for a boss, it always ended with “you got what you ordered.”)
Because of the War, we have a fondness for canned foods - Hormel SPAM, Libby’s Vienna sausages and corned beef, Van Camp’s pork & beans, Coral tuna. Hawaii hadn’t fared well during the Depression and its malaise continued into the Forties. My grandmother used to tell stories of mixing flour into poi so as to stretch it out for a month, until it was mostly a ghostly white. Oddly the War brought a surfeit of canned food which the Military disdained, which us Islanders eat up. .
Or my relatives from England, who wanted to do two things on their two-week driving holiday in Ontario: visit Niagara Falls, and visit the Rocky Mountains. :eek:
The weird thing is, I got the same respinse from a Detroiter when I was working there. This was duing the Calgary Olympics, and I flying back to Oshawa for the weekend. He said, “Are you going over to Calgary to take in some of the events?”
I had to explain to him that Alberta is northwest of Maontana.
I’ve never heard of one of those before, but it looks a wee bit like an ice cream parfait.
Orlando, Florida is the starting point (generally) where people start differentiating between sweet and unsweetened iced tea. South Florida primarily serves unsweetened tea, and somewhere above Ocala, Florida, the sweetened tea tastes a bit more like sugar water than actual brewed tea.
