Not a state (and on preview I see others had mentioned it already), but people who live in and around Washington, D.C., refer to it more often than not as D.C. (and never “Washington”). Indeed, whether people refer to this city as D.C. or Washington is an excellent (and in my experience perfect) test of whether they’ve ever lived here. Not terribly surprising, actually, as the District of Columbia is a real thing, but Washington’s just a name. It used to be a city, but it no longer exists.
I can assure you us southern denizens refer to Northern Cali as NoCal (note no “R”). I’m not sure if Monterey qualifies, however, or where the “cutoff” would be, but I always think of NoCal as SJ on up.
Yeah, we’re kinda in a tough spot. Not really north or south. On the news, we’re usually “central coast” but even that seems not quite right sometimes.
Not so much in spoken use, but New York is very often written as NY. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether that’s referring to the city or the state, though.
the capital of the u.s. is dc. washington is the state on the other side of the country… i am bugged by people who call it washington state. there is dc and there is washington.
always called it mass, as in " boston, mass 02134"
new jersey was always jersey.
i always went with new york city or nyc, i feel calling it new york is a bit disrespectful to those who live in new york but not in the city.
An example from slightly out of the OP’s range – not because there aren’t states in Mexico (there are), but because it is (like the District of Columbia) a “district” and not a state, is the Distrito Federal (Federal District) of Mexico – that is, basically, Mexico City – which anyone who’s anyone will refer to as “DF”, pronounced “Day Efay”. Occasionally you’ll even here Mexico City residents referred to jocularly as “defeños”.
I searched through the constitution , and can find no support for it’s having been called a republic in that document. Period.
:smack: However, the fact that “California Republic” is on the sate flag, and it is called the Republic of California in legal documents kinda puts the lie to that. It seems it is called a republic because:
California criminal cases are demoninated “The People of the State of California v. Smith.” (I just looked it up on Findlaw.com’s page on the Michael Jackson case.) Ergo, California calls itself a State. In Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, the states which refer to themselves as commonwealths, criminal cases are styled Commonwealth v. Jones.
In college we referred to that popular spring break destination as F-L-A. The state’s pre-two-letter-postal-code abbreviation was traditionally Fla. Never heard anyone from that state say that, though, and I lived there for a year.
Not a state, but a recognized part of a state is Michigans Upper Penesula which is always referred to as the the U.P. by the locals. You can tell the newbes in the crowd because they are always asking where the U.P. is at and then everyone gets to give them the you poor dumb bastard look.
