Up north, down south, back east, out west.
I guess I live in the down and out Southwest?
This goes back to Colonial days: “Out West” meant the Ohio Valley, or anything west of the original 13 colonies, up to the Mississippi. I’ve always assumed this is what Horace Greeley meant when he wrote “Go west, young man.” The Louisiana Purchase extended that to the area just on the west side of the Mississip. Everything west of that was “the Far West”.
Thus, “Midwest” meant the areas west, but not too west. Thus, the meaning of the word today. It took me a long long time to understand this, and why.
I grew up in SoCal in the 1950s and 1960s. My parents were from Detroit. My father’s three sisters likewise. My mother’s four sisters stayed in Detroit. Thus, in my family, the relatives in Detroit were always “back east”.
I was doing some mental math and something didn’t seem right. . . .
This. My uncle was a professor at Northwestern and growing up, I had no idea why “western” was part of the name.
Back in the 60s and 70s, especially for Mormon pioneer-stock families like mine, Utah really was an insular island. My father really had distain for the “East Coast” liberals and California was another exotic land.
That’s true, my paternal father came from there.
In Raoul Walsh’s biopic about Jim Corbett, Gentleman Jim, Errol Flynn plays Corbett and Jack Carson his buddy, Walter. When he wins his first bout in San Francisco the two of them go on a bender then wake up in a hotel room. Trying to figure out where they are, Walter sticks his head out the window and sees a building down the street with Salt Lake City Ice Company painted on the roof. “Salt Lake City?? That’s way back east somewhere. How did we get here?”
It probably got a big laugh in 1942.
Do you have (an)other father(s) who aren’t paternal?
I would assume, only the ones who are from islands which are inexplicably not insular.
There may be another issue here, regarding language:
The word “back” doesn’t always mean “the original place I’m from”.
Sometimes it just refers to a location–the back part.
We all use the phrase " back yard". Farmers refer to one of their fields as the “back 40” (acres).
So “back East” could just be a colloquialism for “way back there”.
Someplace which is far away…way back, as far as you get go behind where you are now, all the way to the East coast.
And that ties in with the social differences, where the East is the “old country”, stuck back in an older, different culture.
Lived pretty much my whole life in the Midwest and I’ve heard “back East” and “out West” my entire life.
It is only extremely recently that the whole trajectory of the country ceased to be from the east toward the west, one which had existed since before its founding (here we exclude Spain as an evolutionary stub).
There is some relevant history here. AG was released in 1973, about the time that California state colleges were just starting to charge tuition fees. Up to the era of this film, tuition iv California was free for state residents. I went to college there free in 1961-2. Governor Reagan hated that, and by the time he left office, AG was on the screen and free college was gone
For others who don’t know, this is a cool fact that says everything about the eastern bias of the country.
The foundation of Northwestern University can be traced to a meeting on May 31, 1850, of nine prominent Chicago businessmen, Methodist leaders, and attorneys who had formed the idea of establishing a university to serve what had been known from 1787 to 1803 as the Northwest Territory. On January 28, 1851, the Illinois General Assembly granted a charter to the Trustees of the North-Western University, making it the first chartered university in Illinois.
Western Reserve University in Cleveland (now part of Case Western Reserve) also draws its name from being in the Northwest Territory.
That may be, but probably not terribly relevant for American Graffiti, as it was set in 1962. (Unless, that is, George Lucas was trying to make an obscure and anachronistic point about the loss of free in-state college tuition.)
Eastern schools were largely considered superior to the ones ‘out West’, and not just in their own opinions as it is now. Just as now there are the A list schools that are mostly ‘back East’. A student’s parents may have gone to a school ‘back East’ that the want their children to attend, and the student may have a legacy privilege or scholarship opportunities. So going ‘back East’ to school may have been some kind of commentary about the quality of the schools or parental influence.
Well, if you are in California where the film takes place, pretty much the entire rest of the country is “back East”.
I’ve heard people make similar statements in New York. i.e. they are moving “back West”. Much of the population of the USA is on the east and west coasts. And California and New York City tend to attract people from all over the country (even if net migration has been negative recently). Although I tend to think “back East” as referring to the Eastern Seaboard / New England while “back West” tends to refer to the Midwestern states.
So IOW, it’s a fairly common scenario (particularly in movies) where a person or family moves to California (or New York City) to pursue their dreams, start a career, transfer for that big promotion, etc. Things don’t work out as planned, they start to reconsider and decide to “move back East (or back West)”. The presumption being they are heading back to where things are less competitive or at the very least where they have family, friends and a familiar setting in which to live out their failed dreams in mediocrity.
Anyhow, that’s how I interpret the expression.
There’s no statement to that effect in the film, but I think the context (the teenager is torn between leaving a high sweetheart versus going out into the big wide world) implies that he was born and raised in California.
This I understand. What i was wondering about was more the “back” part of the phrase, specifically whether, among people who use it, there is kind of an instinctive understanding that “the East” has the status of being a homeland or an origin, even if they, individually, do not hail from there.
In modern usage, it’s just idiom - we say “back east” because that’s the phrase people use to refer to places east of here. No doubt, it’s origin was more literal, but there’s no particular connotation to it anymore. As someone who was born in California, and who has lived here my entire life, I don’t feel any particular emotional connection to the east coast as my “homeland,” above and beyond it simply being part of the country I was born in.
It is pretty close to those numbers right now! Cite
Pretty much this. Both my parents were born in Ohio (although by dad’s family moved to California when he was a little kid), so Ohio was back East. But so was just about anything east of the Mojave.
I started college in 1973 (UCLA), and I took a Cultural Geography class as a freshman. The professor liked to do a quiz on the first day of class. He’d ask kids to raise their hands if they were born in California – about half the class would raise their hands (out of approximately 75 kids). Then, he ask how many kids’ grandparents were born here – the hands would drop to about 8-10. When he moved one more generation back, I think there was one kid in my class with his hand up. He said if asked the same question in Iowa, the majority would have their hands raised for at least 3 or 4 generations.