As a lawyer, my father tends to render terms into legalese. To him, a broom is a sweeper and a dustpan is a sweepee.
We call them bubblers in southeastern Massachusetts, too.
Three generations all grew up in the same place and all used the same old-fangled gadgets, so nothing my grandparents or parents said ever struck me as being unusual. But my daughter thinks every other word out of my mouth dates to the stone age.
Is that an unusual term? It seems common to me. 
Or are you just up to some shenanigans? 
These two are familiar to me.
I’m not sure if it’s a western Canadian thing or a Canadian thing, but we call underwear “gotch” or “gitch” (or “gitchies”). That sounds pretty close to “gutchies” - they must have some kind of similar etymology.
My mother, who is 82, was born and raised in ‘Baldymore’ City. She also told me that a number of people in her family were buried in Bonnie Brae Cemetary – only very old people call New Cathedral Cemetary this.
My dad’s side of the family was from East Balmer, and said things like ‘shar’ for ‘shower’, ‘tar’ for tire, ‘wheelbar’ as mentioned above. Some of their relatives lived on the Eastern Sher.
With bubblers I always thought that the ones that were always on were bubblers but if you turned them on with a button or knob it was a drinking fountain.
Mostly because everyone knew what bubblers were. They were all in downtown Portland.
anyone else have a ‘summer kitchen’? A building a few steps from the ‘back door’ where we had a wood burning stove to heat the copper boiler full of hot water to do the washing on the Maytag, using home made lye soap. I had to carry about 20 buckets of water from the barnyard well when it was wash day, usually doing that on sunday night. We ran our cow milk through a hand turned separator (had to be completely disassembled down to the dozens of little conical plates inside every use and washed in very hot water), to get the cream to sell on Saturday night ‘uptown’. The skim milk left over was used to make ‘clabber cheese’, or to slop the hogs and dogs. Sunday morning we would have a light breakfast, put on our Sunday Clothes and go to Sunday School and Church. Then we would have ‘Sunday Dinner’ and often take a ride in the car to visit relatives, bringing the older ones a bit of dessert or left over pot roast, maybe. Some folks called the box built in to the dashboard a ‘glove box’, others called it a ‘cranny’, or ?
Here’s better link.
Several of these are familiar to me. My family (originally from rural Alabama) also said “warsh” and “warsh rags”. Until now, I always thought that was a Southern thing. My grandma (a lovely woman but very much a product of her area and time) called black people “nigras”. I later found out she actually used much less polite terms but not in front of us because my dad insisted she not use those words around us.
I only have a couple of new offerings. Grandma used to refer to toys as “play purties”. Kids were called “chilluns” and when we were being silly, we were “tow heads”.
My uncle used to refer to Blacks as “Blacksters” without a trace of irony or malice. That’s just what he called them.
His mother immigrated from Sweden around the turn of the 20th century and laced her conversations with Swedish or pseudo-Swedish words. One of her favorites was peen leevat, which meant carte blanche, or the right to do whatever you wanted to do. “He thinks he has peen leevat to act so silly but he doesn’t.”
Another word was pinka, meaning urine, or urinate, as in Oh, I gotta go pinka. My mother knew many words and phrases in Swedish and used them if she did not want others to know what she was talking about, especially in conversation with her mother. In her later years Mother was in the hospital for an asthma attack, and when I visited her she was only semi- coherent. She muttered “pinka, pinka, pinka” and the doctors asked me what she might be trying to say. She was catheterized so I told her to let 'er rip, go ahead and pinka. The doctor thanked me for educating him and the nurses.
Any Swedish speakers out there can refute or verify this if they want to.
This reminds me, my granny referred to the state as Mary Land.
mmm
Just thought of this: “show” to mean “movie theater”.
“I’m going to the show to see a movie.”
“They town down that old show on Main Street last year.”
If anyone displayed exceptional eyesight (e.g. finding a small dropped object on a highly-patterned carpet) my parents would say they had “eyes like a stinking cod”.
FWIW they’re from Bristol (UK).
Yes! We had one of those, with a door to the back yard.
I still tease my mother about “her stories.”
My late not-so-politically correct father once cracked me up by referring to these nuts as “African-American toes.” :rolleyes:
“Hoover” is very much a Britishism. A friend of my husbands, in England, named her dog Hoover.
Other Britishisms, mentioned here: “Spend a penny” is now used as a polite term for using the toilet. Sort of like “powder my nose.” “Milk float” is the van that delivers (delivered?) milk daily.
Define “older” please. Older in your view, that is.
I’d not use the word “weird” to describe your examples; more like archaic.
My father refers to electricity as “fire.” He’s not well educated, and frankly I doubt he understands the difference.
Simon Benson thought the loggers were going to the bars to drink beer and whiskey because they were thirsty. So he invested $10,000 in these free drinking fountains.
Turns out that the loggers and other workers were going to the bars to get drunk and get laid.
But those Benson Bubblers were a great public benefit for the people downtown who wouldn’t be going to the bars. Great idea, different result. And the Bull Run water is some of the best to be found, for free.
My grandparents, may they rest in peace, referred to corn as rowsneers. I didn’t figure out until I was a teenager that this was “roasting ears.” Roasted or not, all corn was rowsneers. I use the term every chance I get.
My parents used ‘show’ as a synonym for motion picture. “We went out to a show last night.”
My dad (from rural Ontario) did the same thing. I acquired a mutated version of it, in which “front room” is a placeholder for any room whose name I can’t think of (that isn’t a bedroom, bathroom, or kitchen). For example, the sort of combined small living/dining room in my current apartment, I generally call the “front room” even though it’s in the middle of the house, with a rear-facing window. Sometimes I call my office that too (it’s legitimately in the front of the house).
My dad used “dinner” for “lunch”, on occasion (usually when he was distracted). (Incidentally, this is how meals break down in Quebec French, too: déjeuner, dîner, souper – unlike France, where they go petit déjeuner, déjeuner, dîner.)
I think my dad called them that too sometimes. He also used “light standard” for lamppost, a grand old Canadianism.
Was your grandmother from 1) Ukraine, 2) western Canada?
Wow, do people not use that verb anymore? I do all the time. (Yes, I know microwave radiation and ionizing radiation are not the same.)
My mom had one that I remember. (I mean, she’s still alive, but I’ve asked her not to use it because it’s disturbing.)
Several times when I was in high school, she came home from work early and said that she got “laid off”. Meaning, work was slow and so they made her go home early that day. Not that she was permanently not working any more (or even a medium-term “temporary layoff”.) After a couple times of her saying that, I asked her to please say “they let us out early today” instead of saying “they laid me off today” in the future!