This is a really interesting phenomenon. I think it has come about through an increasing inclination of people who want to show off by sounding like “an insider”, who is in the know about local nicknames.
Thinking back to the 1950s, the only college sports teams I can recall ever being referenced by abbreviation letters were USC, UCLA, NYU and CCNY. As well as LSU, since there was only one state beginning with L and there was no alternate University of Louisiana, so everybody knew that one. But nobody, even in Big Ten states, ever said MSU or OSU. You always say the name of the state in full (except long ones like Penn State or NC State), but you might shorten the rest, like Georgia Tech or Texas A&M.
It’s extremely common in the greater Boston area. People say “We’re headed into the city” all the time. It is used in daily speech for most of eastern Mass and southern NH.
As a New Yorker, I was delighted by how cute it was when I visited my in-laws in Oklahoma and realized they say “the City” for Oklahoma City (although it took me a while to adjust, I kept thinking they were asking me about things at home when they would say “which restaurant did you like the best when you were in the the City?”).
I thought that at least part of the reason is that Oklahoma City, like New York City*, has the actual word “city” in its name. So I wonder if this also happens more frequently in the area of Kansas City, or Salt Lake City, for example.
*really the City of New York, but even the official web site of the City of New York is nyc.gov
Specifically, the region east of Raleigh all the way to the edge of the mainland. The little ridge of land outside the Pamlico Sound is the Outer Banks and its own region altogether.
The ward system of Houston stopped being used in the early 1900s. I believe the New Orleans ward system is still in use. Certain areas of Houston are sometimes referred to by their ward name (primarily the 5th Ward). The Parish system of Louisiana is just an alternative to the county system in the other states. Texas does not use a parish system.
I grew up in a little town in Wisconsin, which was subdivided into Wards, and in fact I went to elementary at South Ward School. Milwaukee had wards, and Chicago, and I believe they still do.
I believe St. Louis is the only city that uses the term “depressed lanes” to describe off-ramp streets that are associated with the interstate highway.
A traveler often hears local traffic vernacular on the traffic reports on the radio, which are often mystifying to an outsider. Denver has a region known as “The Mousetrap”. In New Orleans, when the traffic reporter says “Industrial crossings are in the down position”, he means the drawbridges over the shipping canals, and car traffic can move unimpeded when they are down.
There is one city (I forgot which one) where commuters who live on the west side of town are called “Squinties”, because they have to drive into a low rising sun in the morning, and into a low setting sun in the afternoon.
When I was a kid in PA, road signs warned, “Bridge freezes before roadway”. Traveling through the southern US I laughed at signs saying, “Bridge ices before roadway”.
