Emphasis mine. For my grandparents, scripted dramas and soap operas were “stories”. Possessive article, too; it wasn’t “a story”, but “my story”.
My dad uses “Oriental” too, along with “Chinamen”. Those terms seemed to fall out of favor much later than “colored” or “negro”.
This might be a regional usage, but people in New York City seem to lump everyone of Hispanic/Latino descent – Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, etc – together into “Spanish”, even though few “Spanish” in NYC are from Tierra de Nava. I’ve heard “Spanish” as a noun a few times (“There’s a lot of Spanish standing over there.”) I can’t ever recall anyone using “Spanish” in this context who wasn’t from NYC.
My older relatives shopped at Krogers instead of Kroger. I’ve wondered if it did have an S originally? So many older people say it that way.
Using the possessive form for business names that aren’t otherwise possessive is common in Michigan and Western New York. You see it in all age groups, but it’s more common among blue collar and older folks. “Gotta’ go to da’ Walmart’s. They got a sale on televisions from Sony’s there.”
My very countyr grandparents always did that, along with “warsh” and mispronouncing city and state names, such as saying Iowa as Io-way, Chicago as Chicag-uh, etc.
And they’d insert a random S where it didn’t even make sense as a possessive, like WoolSworth instead of Woolworth.
My grandma says “dungarees” or “britches” for pants. The toilet is the “commode”. And the word “idea” is always pronounced with an R at the end.
She has a lot of these things, only I can’t think of them because they seem normal to me now!
They weren’t the only ones. But my grandparents didn’t call it that. They called it kill 'em quick.
The spouse and I both call the remote control the “clicker” (we use the same word for the garage door opener). Neither of us are old enough to remember when they actually clicked.
My grandfather used to call breasts “accoutrements” (prounounced “uh-COO-tru-munts”) and my mom picked it up as well. I was probably 12 or so before I realized that it wasn’t a proper synonym.
My mom called vacuuming “running the sweeper” and used “worshrag” for washcloth. She grew up in Pennsylvania.
She also called pimples or blackheads “bleekies.” I still use that one.
I’m in my forties and when I was at school - in rural Ireland - homework was called lessons.
I don’t know if the word still has currency because I have no kids, but it certainly was in use with that meaning when I was a kid.
My grandfather is dead now but he always called Icelandic people Skrobs. All of his pals did too and they all worked on fishing trawlers and so met a lot of Icelandic men. If that word is a nasty swear word and anyone from Iceland is aghast, I would like to apologise.
I heard an old man talking today in a pub about that “Skrob volcano” - the one I can’t spell or pronounce but which has caused havoc over the last two or three years. And I was vividly reminded of my Grandpa. Which made me smile
So I hope I don’t find out now that he was a shocking old racist. :eek:
My mother’s family is Pennsylvania Dutch, so we have some great words borrowed from that culture. Unfortunately the borrowing was all word of mouth, so I’m guessing on the spellings:
A small thing or piece of something is a schnipple.
Scoot over was ruch over. “Ruch” means to advance or move in small increments.
Non-specific illness is referred to as The Opnemma. Mom said this was a wasting sickness often applied to infants who failed to thrive. We use it now to describe pretty much any general malaise, including hangovers.
Doughnuts are fasnachts.
We also utilize Dutch sentence structure sometimes: “Hey! Look the window out!”
My grandfather refers to green bell peppers as “mangoes”. My mom also sometimes used terms like “Colored, Oriental, and Spanish” in private and she’s only in her 50s.
It’s also a class thing. Dinner did originally mean the main meal of the day; in Henry VIII’s day it was served around (or even slightly before) noon. As time wore on the fashionable dinner hour (for the upper classes) got pushied into the evening by the late Victorian era. Luncheon was created as a lighter meal to fill the gap between breakfast and dinner. The working classes kept the old hours, as did domestic servants. After luncheon was served upstairs the staff would sit down to dinner in the early afternoon, and after dinner was over upstairs the servants would eat a light supper late (sometimes very late) in the evening. The middle classes naturally copied the upper classes as best they could. For holiday day meals (like Thanksgiving & Christmas) dinner is still served in the afternoon instead of evening.
When I moved to Missouri, My in-laws made fun of me for saying I was from “Washington”. I kept telling them there was no “R” in it, but, they wouldn’t believe me!
I’m afraid my grandfather referred to Black people as “'Coons.” We had no blacks in our area until I was in high school. They were my friends. I was appalled when I learned how distasteful that term was! Once I told him, he stopped.
Heh - Low German is not too far away from Dutch, and that sentence structure is familiar - “Throw the cow over the fence some hay.” 
I’ve remember a few more oddball words that my family uses -
Dishrag - tubdueck
Off-kilter - vavinksch
A cold, light meal eaten in the middle of the afternoon - faspa (usually consisting of ham, pickles, buns, cheese, and whatever else you’ve got in your fridge)
A bedtime snack was known in my family as night lunch - that’s probably a direct translation, but we didn’t use the Low German phrase for that one.
Don’t forget that Pennsylvania Dutch is actually low German or very close. It is not real Dutch.
I believe “carfare” still has some currency in the sense of what people pay for public transit in the larger scheme of their budgets, sort of in the same way people might talk about “pocketbook” issues with regard to an upcoming election. (Some Americans, though, do use the word pocketbook to denote the thing they keep money in.)
One of my grandmothers said davenport for sofa.
But with regard to sentence structure there is indeed a considerable degree of similarity between Dutch and German.
My (maternal) grandmother, a very nice woman in most ways, called Brazil nuts by the name “n***er toes”. I learned the term and repeated in front of my dad and his jaw just dropped open in horror.
All doughnuts or just a certain kind ? My grandmother used to call doughnuts “fasnacht kechle” (sp?) but I never knew if that meant all doughnuts or just the ones the German bakery sold right before Lent (she apparently wasn’t a big doughnut person, as I never saw her eat any other kind)
My grandmother refers to any and all vacuum cleaners as a “Hoover”, whether it is an actual Hoover brand vacuum or not.
This is still how I understand and use the words.