For what it’s worth*, that’s my understanding of the etymology as well. And it’s not limited to rural areas: I’ve heard it from people who were bawn ‘n’ bred in the the city. In any case, the main meal of the day, whenever it was eaten, was dinner; if one had dinner in the middle of the day, the later meal — frequently but not always soup — was supper.
My contribution: “bug juice” for soy sauce. This may be specific (endemic?) to Montana; whatever its origin, I learned it from my father (on whom be peace), and I’ve made sure that the Ottlets know and love the term as well.
In the house I grew up in we had a sort of chimney over the kitchen stove and there was a metal rain shield over the top of it. When it rained the metal made a delightful glorking sound which somehow we called “gutching and draking”.
My mother-in-law calls hers a sweeper, too. And she keeps her money in a billfold. And she calls corn on the cob “roastin’ ears” - I’ve never heard that from anyone else, even when I live in Indiana myself.
I’m hoping those of you who think “icebox” is a weird name are aware that in the beginning, they were, in fact, boxes with ice to keep everything cold. The ice was delivered in big blocks by the iceman - at least that’s how it was done in the city where my grandparent grew up.
I suppose some of them could have been at some point- I think my mom’s parents (the ones I’m talking about) families had been here (America) since the late 18th or early 19th century.
My grandparents themselves were from far SE Illinois.
Name wise, as far as I can tell, they were generic English and Welsh (Miller & Blackwell were their last names).
Most of these I’m familiar with, so they don’t sound strange to me. Indiana origin, if that helps.
For my contributions, my wife called the TV remote a ‘flipper-switcher’ when we were first married. I’m also convinced she made that up herself. I also remember the first gen remotes as clickers. The ones I had experience with made metallic pings of different frequencies.
When I was a preschooler, I remember that anything my mother tried to convince me was yucky was ‘ish’. The term sort of also became the pet term for banana strings, which she also considered yucky, but I never did.
On my mom’s side, Grandma added an “r” to various “-ash” words, mainly wash = warsh. Which was weird since she was born and bred in MN.
On my dad’s side, Gramma always called the couch the “davenport”, and Grampa called a whiskey-sour a “kanooper”, which I’ve never heard anywhere else. I’m actually surprised I don’t have more from Gramma, since her mother spoke Czech almost exclusively until the day she died. It’s surprising there aren’t more Czech terms floating around the family.
Growing up in Phoenix, all the sliding glass doors were made by the Arcadia Door company. I still say “Open the Arcadia Door”, meaning the sliding glass door.
When I was little, bug juice was a generic term for Kool-Aid or any kind of fruit-flavored drink. Not real juice, just the powdered stuff that was mixed with water. Definitely not soy sauce!
My grandparents always called the sofa a davenport, and the love seat was a divan.
My grandmother also carried a pocketbook. I always thought that was such an weird term. It’s not a pocket, it’s not a book, it doesn’t fit in your pocket…
The TV was a television set. I remember my grandmother asking if I wanted to watch my stories on the television set. I could never figure out why she didn’t just call it a TV.
I’m just old enough to remember calling the remote a clicker. The first ones I remember had just a few buttons; on/off, volume up and down and channel up and down, and yes, it did make a distinctive clicking noise.
I know my parents called jeans dungarees, and we wore “rubbers” over our shoes when it rained.
My mother still calls the vacuum a sweeper.
I remember calling the microwave a Nuker, because you were blasting your food with nuclear radiation. “You gonna put that in the oven?” “Nah, I’m gonna nuke it.”
My ex-MIL called running errands “running the roads” which (to me, at least) always sounded a little like you were doing something you shouldn’t be doing. She commented to someone else once that she had watched the kids for me one day when I had a doctor’s appointment and some other errands that I’d been “running the roads all day” and I had this odd need to defend myself.
So am I! The first one we had (in the early 80s) was one of these…a few years later replaced by one of these. The Jerrold clicked (and needed actual effort to get the buttons to depress), the IR remote didn’t.
(I loved playing with that Jerrold remote…made me feel like I was on a space ship.)
Hah, my dad still uses “colored.” He uses it and the word “negro” interchangeably. He also refers to people as Latins and Orientals. Oh, dad…
Yeah? I’ve never heard people insert the “r” into anything so gratuitously as I had when I moved to Minnesota. Whenever someone asked me why I was moving, I’d say “Because I can’t stand to listen to people say ‘warsh’ anymore!”
