My grandmother pronounced Italian words especially food in her New York Italian dialect. So do I. She also said bearl instead of boil and earl instead of boil. To her my brother went to Rutchers not Rutgers. I don’t do that.
So did my father, born and raised in SC. However, his grandfather was from England, and I think the family picked some phrasings from him. “Dead as a hammer” was one expression. And pronouncing “saucepan” as “sawsp’n” for another.
Damn it, I can’t believe I’m coming up short, considering my sisters and I spend a lot of our free time making fun of my old man’s dadisms. I was watching The Simpsons today and Homer used the word “monkeyshines” which dad used when we were horsing around as kids. He also still refers to young boys as “lads,” which isn’t an unusual term, but it’s pretty dated. I never hear people saying “I met this young lad, and…” in any seriousness anymore.
That’s all I got for the moment. Dad uses ordinary terms that we all know, but are dated. Things like referring to dress pants as “slacks” and instructing people to “wash up.” My mom has a lot of names for stuff that seem weird to some, but it’s not as fun to play this game with her, since most of her momisms are pretty basic Caribbean/Latino terms. God, I feel like calling my sisters. “Quick! I need some dadisms!”
My grandmother had a few, but the only one I can remember is when she worked down the road at a chicken farm and was talking about how she got a “boneless” for christmas, which I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or not given her penchant for misusing words.
Working with Brits (oops, I meant residents of Great Britain) left me with a few terms & phrases that I still use to the quizzical regard of some:
Ring Spanner - box-end wrench
Having “a bit o’ snap” - a snack or some lunch
Having “a kip in my pit” or “a bit of a lie-down” for a nap
Get “bricked up” - drinking beer to ostensibly be hydrated for next day’s labors
To " get tore into" or “get after” a job or project that needs doing
Very common here. Pretty much every school will have a few rows of bubblers for students to get drinks from, like the top photo on this page.
My grandfather always referred to his bolt-action .22 as a ‘pea rifle’ and rabbbit was ‘underground chicken’.
My friend who is first generation Canadian, of Dutch parents was the only person I knew who used that term. But I told her to stop.
Night Lunch is the term used in some psychiatric hospitals for the evening snack. I have even seen former patients in the community talk about “night lunch.”
My dad used to be driven crazy by the older generation calling the radio the “wireless”. He always pointed to the power cord and said “there’s a wire, right here.” My mom called the ice-ream that was on special “brick of the month”, because that was what they would buy for a Saturday evening family treat.
All new to me! Whereabouts were they from?
That’s a regionalism, still said by people of all ages in Wisconsin.
They even have a shirt. The front says “Most Americans call it a water fountain or even a drinking fountain, but we prefer to call it The Bubbler.”
The back says “Fountains are where you throw coins”
True story:
Neighbors, at the New York World’s Fair, asked a guard where the nearest bubbler was.
“Down past this building, take a right and how are things in Milwaukee?”
Looking at websites that describe the Baltimore (or Maryland) dialect, like the one I linked to, I always get the impression that it’s an interesting amalgam of the usages and pronunciation of both Southern and Northeastern American.
So it doesn’t surprise me that someone in SC would also say it.
IIRC there was an episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy planned to make Ricky jealous by having him walk in while another man was making love to (her words) to her. It basically meant flirting.
I though they worked on sound. I remember my mom saying something about how their dog would yelp whenever they used it.
heh heh, yep, grew up in Wisconsin here and “bubblers” were how I first learned the term for drinking fountain. My dad still calls them that, and still refers to both Coke and Pepsi as “Pop”. Also does the “dinner/supper” thing.
My stepdad did, from living in North Dakota. Icebox for fridge, davenport for couch. I forget the rest, he eventually started talking like the rest of us.
My mother-in-law, whose English isn’t too good to begin with, calls a cell phone a pocket phone. My wife taught her that recently, though, after her mother kept asking why is it called that–a fair question–and she couldn’t explain it and got sick of her constant questions.
My father says “Jewess.” And he is a scholar of Jewish history, and they have to keep editing it.
My Dad (b. 1920) called the phone “the blower”
Growing up, food was kept in the icebox (I still sometimes call it that)
I still look for the clicker
My parents used washrags not wash cloths, so do I.
The bureau is where I keep my folded clothes
Those red veggies that go on a BLT and in salads? Those are toMAHtoes 
“Gutchies” for underwear - I’ve only ever heard my friend from Pittsburgh use that term!
When I was a kid, mother would use the word buda for defecating, as in “do you have to go buda?” The story goes, that during potty training, one of us chubby kids sitting on the little potty training pot reminded her of a picture she saw of the Buda.
Yep, it’s old fashioned, but still relatively common in England- it’s specifically having a pee, if you need to know. It simply refers to public toilets that you put a coin in the cubicle door to open, which were pretty widespread at one time (they more often have a coin operated turnstile to get into the bathroom now, and cost more than a penny).
My Dad’s from Lancashire, so I get quite a few weird ones off him, though in his case it’s mainly deliberately messing about.
A ‘lummox’, or a ‘gowk’ are both clumsy or daft people, a ‘ginnel’ is an alleyway, and ‘eeeh, ecky thump!’ is a general expression of surprise. He also calls the phone a ‘blower’.
His aunt, who lived with us when I was little, never had much education and used dialect all the time- including ‘tha’ instead of ‘you’, and glottal stops instead of ‘the’.
My paternal great-grandmother apparently had such a strong accent and used so many dialect words, that she needed a translator to speak to my mother. I don’t think th’ owd Lancashire she spoke even exists any more.
My grandma said that in front of the whole extended family at Christmas one year. Everyone was horrified, my mom and her sibs informed her how offensive it was. I don’t know if she ever understood why, but she never said it again.
My 92-year-old mom thinks “hickeys” are synonymous with pimples, so when she was describing a hickey she had, I had to explain to her that a hickey was a love bite.
My grandmother talking about a new neighbor, “She’s Puerto Rican, but she’s nice.” It was not worth it to explain to her what was wrong with that.