I’m from New Jersey and I’ve always said “glove compartment”. I’ve never heard “glove box” used anywhere. And I’ve never seen gloves in them. I think the name is meant to conjure up images of the really long-ago pre-windscreen days when drivers needed gloves and goggles, and kept them in the car. God knows why anyone would want to conjure up that image, though.
They’re making Narragansett in Rochester? That makes no sense. They’re supposed to be making Genesee up there, on the Genesee River. The Narragansett’s in New England!
When I moved to the far boston suburbs in the mid-70s, I used to routinely hear “chuck”, “chunk” and sometimes even “hunk” as synonyms for “toss”. I haven’t heard those words used since Jr. High (I don’t recall them ever being used in my high school career, though the HS was just across the street from the JHS.
“Wikked pissa” also didn’t make the transition to the high school, but I (sadly) still hear it from men (never women) my age, sometimes wryly, sometimes from people who grew up in certain towns north of Boston. I find it even more cringeworthy today, coming from forty-somethings.
I once heard “I hosey” (“I chose”, presumably via the French Canadian “chosir”) from a proud self-proclaimed FrCan, but none of the 24 New Englanders in the class had a clue what he meant. Only the Southerner (me) who had been boning up on the dialect had ever heard the term before. It was listed in the books, but definitely not in use – and to be honest, I think he got it from a book or picked it up during a year he spent in Alaska. Otherwise our classmates, who had grown up with him, would have understood it.
This one I’m dubious about. They don’t say “chuck” for “toss” in other parts of the U.S.? I say it myself, and I know I didn’t pick it up here. In fact, for whatever reason, my wife, who did grow up in New England, has a pet-peevish hatred for that word. I haven’t heard “chunk” for “toss” in a while, but again, I don’t think it’s a New England thing.
Chuck is a toss, huck is a hard throw, as in “chuck those boots downstairs”, or “Shaddup or I’ll huck a crabapple at your head.” Jimmies are chocolate. I still hosey things, sometimes I hi-hosey them. Beer comes from the packey. Water comes from the bubbler. Empties go in the barrel.
FTR, I’m 36 years old. Grew up right here on the North Shore.
I think the difinition of Jimmies depends on which part of NE you’re from. Or, actually, which part of MA you’re from. When I was growing up in Worcester, Jimmies and Sprinkles were the same thing. Out here in Western MA, no one seems to know what I’m talking about when I say Jimmies. They call all colors Sprinkles - or in some cases, Shots.
I still hear Packy used all the time and use it myself occasionally. I have never used Tonic.
I think Friendly’s still has Frappes listed on their menus. Bickford’s still used the word when I worked there 8 years ago. It used to annoy me when people would mispronounce it.
I have never heard of a Spuckie. I grew up calling them either hoagies (I was raised by a New Yorker) or grinders. To this day, I will not use Sub to talk about a grinder.
One that annoys me is “down to”, as in, I’m going down to the airport. Never mind that the airport in Worcester is at the top of a very large hill and you will never go “down” on your way there. I have never heard anyone under the age of 60 say this. And, only people raised in Worcester seem to say it.
I know quite a few people who still say wicked pissah and so don’t I.
I use very few of these regional terms or accents because my mother was very strict about her children not growing up to speak like idiots (as she described it).
Oh, and a proper “regular” is a medium, unflavored coffee with two cream and two sugar.
Okay, I do this all the time. Especially when I’m referring to a location in an ingrammatical manner. “Down the Shaws”, “Down to (northernly located) Seabrook”, “Down the Teej*”, “Down The Tarj**.”
I’ve always thought that ‘please?’ was strictly a Cincinnati-ism, and stemmed from the use, in German, of ‘bitte?’ in the same way. Are there enclaves of please in the Northeast?
Incidentally, as a Cincinnatian/Pittsburgher, I should mention that some of these seem to have migrated outside of the NE, if that’s their original locale; I’ve heard ‘jimmies’ occasionally used interchangably for either the rainbow or the chocolate version. ‘Book it’ was the name of a summer reading campaign when i was in elementary school, with implications of being a play on the slang version. ‘down to’ shows up here as well, as does ‘sawr,’ along with related '-awr-'isms like Mt. Warshington for Mt. Washington.
So, to borrow a regionalism of uncertain provenance from my grandfather, how 'bout them apples?